Using Analytics on My Website

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
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  • Plausible Analytics

    Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

  • > Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.

    GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

    Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.

    That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

    I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

    People have also said good things about Plausible Analytics as well: https://plausible.io/

  • GoAccess

    GoAccess is a real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.

  • > Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.

    GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

    Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.

    That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

    I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

    People have also said good things about Plausible Analytics as well: https://plausible.io/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

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  • Umami

    Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

  • 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

  • GoatCounter

    Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data.

  • I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.

  • PostHog

    🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host.

  • Hi HN, PostHog employee here. I'm working on our Web Analytics product, which is currently in beta. It's fun to see us mentioned here :)

    I should mention that we have a ton of SDKs (see https://posthog.com/docs/libraries) for back end frameworks and languages, so if you wanted to use PostHog without any client-side JS you could send pageviews and other events manually, but for the vast majority of people it makes more sense to use our JS snippet.

    Hijacking this comment to share the roadmap for web analytics https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/18547. It's very much in the launch-early-and-be-embarassed phase, but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions that people have, particularly if you're already a PostHog user.

  • pirsch

    Pirsch is a drop-in, server-side, no-cookie, and privacy-focused analytics solution for Go.

  • I was also looking for server-side analytics, created my own, and now it's a product! The idea is that tracking can be done from both, a JS snippet (for easy integration) and an API. Both rely on fingerprinting and almost provide the same set of features. The API just lacks screen resolution. The method is GDPR (and CCPA and whatnot) compliant.

    Original article: https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

    Product: https://pirsch.io

    before this comes up again: Yes, we checked professionally with an external DPO and it was checked by some companies you've probably heard of externally.

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