counter.dev VS Plausible Analytics

> Rather than what looks to be an unproven pet project of some developer. If nobody is paying for it, there are no guarantees of uptime or support.

It's pay what you want. The project is running for three years already, let's see how things go with time.

Apologies for the long downtime. The issue is being resolved, see here for updates:

- https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev/issues/124

- counter.dev -> Something that I need but it has a lack of accuracy and very tiny functionality.

> Right, and being sessionStorage it's cleared on browser close, and the next time I visit I will be counted as another daily unique visitor right?

No! There are a few rudimentary mechanisms on top of each other if one of them fails as you described. The /track endpoint sets up http caching. So if sessionStorage fails, you still have that. Then there is also inspecting document.referrer. If it is the page you are already on, then it's definitely not a unique visit.

> (or why not just a cookie)

Because cookies are considered "bad". But technically basically just saving a boolean value on the cookie would not be worse from a privacy perspective than using sessionStorage for a boolean value.

> I personally would rather have the pages I visit use a self-hosted solution gather everything I do, instead of a third-party getting little data from many sites I use. If this script is used across many sites it can be checked server-side against my IP to get my usage. I can never verify what logs they keep and for how long.

That is a general problem with externally hosted services. You can audit the source code (https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev) but there is not way to verify that my deployment is as stated. I heard a podcast once that web hosters could guarantee that a deployment is in a specific way and contains a specific code base revision. But such solutions unfortunately do not exist. If you really want to be sure self hosting is the way to go (but somewhat cumbersome)

I think you can go with counter.dev

I am providing a free and open source web analytics service: https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev / counter.dev

From their Github. ​

I think a single Google Analytics alternative is pretty hard to pick considering that GA can be used to very much varying extents.

For simple and "detailed enough" insights, I enjoyed using Plausible (https://plausible.io/) in the past.

For more in depth analytics that give you a detailed view into your own product, PostHog.com seems to be by far the best and most popular option out there.

I could do the same exercise with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, but luckily I don't need to, since Plausible already did. A piece of advice, rip out Google Analytics and use Plausible instead. It first of all doesn't destroy your website, and secondly it doesn't violate the GDPR - So you can embed it on your site without having to warn your visitors about that they're being spied on by Google.

Also, currently we are using https://plausible.io/ for analytics. No other bugs.

I just swapped out Google Analytics with Plausible for AINIRO.IO. It’s only been a week, but so far I am super jazzed about it. First of all, Plausible doesn’t use cookies, so I can completely drop all cookie disclaimers and popups I had because of GDPR. Second of all, the site scores significantly better on load time. This results in a 10x better user experience for my website visitors, while making sure the website is still 100% conforming to GDPR laws.

No clue what you mean, browser cache might even clear itself without you doing anything manually. This thing makes no sense.

Nowhere ever did it say Tech Demo anywhere, not in the HN headline, not on the page itself. No, thanks. And even as a tech demo, there is nothing impressive going in. It is stores shit to local storage, I guess. Lol, I just looked this up, and it was in Firefox on 2009 already? WHAT? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/loca... I never used it myself directly, but I remember reading about some API that kind of is the new version of cookies that can store more and better and I think that is it. 2009, I would swear what I think about was newer, maybe I am mixing something up, maybe not.

It has unnecessarily tracking from the comment above, not sure if it even sends all your notes to https://plausible.io, and I do not care. For me, this fails as a tech demo or whatever the fuck It's supposed to be. Sorry to not get all excited about everything posted here. In 2009 it for sure would ;)

If you already use Posthog, Web Analytics has been in Public Beta for quite some time.[1]

If I remember correctly, CloudFlare Analytics does not need you to register your domain with them. I personally feel keeping domain registration coupled with your DNS provider is not a good idea.

Plausible[2] has an Open Source self-hostable version but is not so updated in sync with their SaaS version.

Umami[3] is another simple, clean one. And, of course, as many have suggested, Matomo is the other well-established one. If you want to avoid maintaining a hosting routine, a lot do the hosting out of the box these days. PikaPods[4] was good when I tried and played around for a while.

1. https://posthog.com/docs/web-analytics

2. https://github.com/plausible/analytics

3. https://umami.is

4. https://www.pikapods.com

Plausible - Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

You log the IP address, referrer, user agent and the requested page URL but you don't set a unique cookie to identify the user.

This still gets you plenty of actionable analytics information: where geographically people are located (via GeoIP), what pages are most popular, what platforms (including desktop vs mobile) people are using.

I've been using https://plausible.io for analytics on a bunch of my sites for a couple of years now and I honestly don't miss the extra level of detail I got from cookie-based analytics I've used in the past.