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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Please don't contribute to Google's tracking dominance over the web. How insane is it that one company runs their javascript on 90% of the web?

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What are the best alternatives?

https://piwik.org isn't bad, but last time I checked it was blocked in ublock origin just like GA

https://piwik.org seems to be the go-to open source solution.

piwik or just grep your nginx logs.

Grep? Is that something I need a sysadmin for? /s

Grep is unfortunately close to useless. It gives little to no insights on how long/deep a user stayed on a page, or where they went after that. Or what form fields are getting in the way of users from completing whatever you'd like them to do.

Quick plug for a log analyser: https://goaccess.io which I installed after realising it did all the things I actually wanted from GA (I don't actually need detailed user tracking)

The long term solution is usually building an in-house analytics service but it's not easy and cheap. We're also developing a generic analytics platform that can be installed with one-click to your favorite cloud provider so that you can store your event data in your database and build an internal analytics service without coding. Check out: https://github.com/rakam-io/rakam

For commercial sites a solution like Adobe marketing cloud (nee Omniture) is an option

Snowplow

Keen IO is a great alternative. Full disclosure, I'm a product manager at Keen. That said, we do help some of our customers move off of GA to gain more control and flexibility in their analytics

I last tried keen a few years ago, and really liked it.

The one thing I didn't like, and stopped using it was the pricing , which looks like has now been updated to be more realistic.

Definitely checking it out again now.

Thanks for the comment Josh. We just completely revamped our pricing. I'd love to get your feedback on what we've done, especially given your previous experience

Heap Analytics -- https://heapanalytics.com

And I run everything through Segment rather than embedding individual trackers directly. Segment either relays data to other services or loads required JS on page load.

It is actually easy to implement GA-like functionality in JS, send the event data to the server, and process it e.g. daily. You can start slowly, e.g. track only clicks (make it sync), visit time and scroll (both async).

Of course my homegrown analytics reporting is far from Google's, but at least I have found a great balance between getting useful usage data on my sites, and at the same time respecting the visitors' privacy.

https://goaccess.io — simply awesome

It's a tough call, especially if your revenue model is ad based. They ad networks only trust 3rd party analytics.

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