Umami VS counter.dev

Are you tired of relying solely on Google Analytics to track your website's performance? Look no further! Introducing Umami , a powerful and privacy-focused alternative that puts you in control of your analytics data. Umami was founded by three brothers, Mike, Brian and Francis Cao as they were frustarted with using Google Analytics, which dominated and still does the industry of analytics despite of privacy concerns. As it is open-source, Umami quickly started being popular open-source project while still respecting privacy of users. My personal opinion, is that Umami is really easy to setup and use, for smaller projects as my personal website it is of great use. It does not many tracking as GA but it really does its job.

Link | Demo | Github | License

For a while now, I've been creating mini web tools to test out ideas or as tiny helpers for myself. I usually publish them on individual subdomains, which might not be the best idea, but I like the concept of a short, easy-to-remember URL. Recently, I discovered that some of these tools actually have a few users, which made me consider adding analytics to them. After a bit of research, I settled on umami. It's a great little privacy-conscious tool with exactly what I need and nothing more.

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

not enough, can confirm, I moved to Umami for ChadNext

Think of metrics that will gather good insights for creating more things for the product later and track them using analytics services like umami or others.

Analytics is something that can easily become a privacy headache. To get around the issues as much as possible, the strategy I've implemented is to self-host the analytics tool Umami (again, via the One click app functionality in CapRover!).

This question is targeted to those who have experience with Umami. I’m wondering if it make sense with a specific configuration.

I've self-hosted Umami and works just fine. Check it out here: https://umami.is/

> 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. ​