Lisa McKnightLast year, Google finally sunsetted Universal Analytics and a lot of website owners have discovered GA4 is a vastly changed platform – and not necessarily for the better!
With its distinct data model and user interface, GA4 presents a learning curve that might not align with every website owner’s needs.
This shift has led many to explore other analytics tools that offer simplified features and easier to use interfaces – ourselves included here at 20i.
Google Analytics might be the most well-known tool, but is it what you need? Here are some GA4 alternative analytics solutions worth exploring.
Matomo
Matomo is the most popular open-source analytics platform that provides similar features to GA4. We are currently testing the self-hosted version at 20i and the results have been really positive so far.
Matomo is installed on more than one million websites and has some impressive clients including Red Bull, the United Nations and NASA.
Matomo can be used without asking for cookie consent. Because Matomo puts you in control of your users’ data 100%, you can protect your users’ privacy and not compromise their information or share with any third party how your users engage with your website.
If you have used Google universal analytics in the past, Matamo is easy to learn. There’s plenty of knowledge base support to help you apply real-time analytics, geolocation, A/B testing and user flow add-ons.
You can track ad campaigns and heatmaps, and combine tracking with e-commerce solutions such as WooCommerce or Magento.
Read our more in-depth Matomo review. Matomo is available as a one-click app with our Reseller Hosting and Managed Hosting.
Plausible
Plausible is an attractive lightweight analytics platform that many users turn to because it provides essential business metrics, and is less complex than GA4.
Plausible uses open-source technology, and is privacy-friendly because you maintain ownership of your customer’s data. Compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PCER, Plausible avoids adblockers and has great support backed by a solid community of developers.
You can track the standard website metrics like pageviews, session duration and referrer information, and protect customer privacy as regards traffic and location data, itemised billing, line identification, and directory listings.
Plausible is a good option for content and marketing teams who want secure, simple website analytics that can be cloud-hosted or self-hosted.
Umami
The best thing about Umami is the simplicity and that you can have everything you want in an analytics tool as a hobbyist on up to 3 websites for free.
You can easily collect and understand your web data — while maintaining visitor privacy and enjoying complete ownership over your user’s data.
You get simple metrics, data on devices used, geo-location, browser usage, as well as the ability to capture events such as button clicks and downloads. You can apply filters to segment users, create custom reports and rely on real-time analytics.
Umami is an excellent choice as it’s open source, GDPR compliant, and super-easy to set up and host.
Cloudflare
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/web-analytics/
Cloudflare Web Analytics is a lightweight web analytics platform that helps you measure core web vitals through real-time data.
Cloudflare offers built-in privacy features that don’t track your website visitors or create buyer profiles designed to retarget your visitors with ads they don’t want.
Cloudflare is good for website owners looking for non-invasive analytics that don’t use any client-side state, such as cookies to collect usage metrics, or fingerprint individuals by the IP addresses, User Agent string or any data designed to identify.
This GA4 alternative offers a clean and simple dashboard and a privacy-centric way to monitor traffic.
Goat Counter
If you have a personal project or new venture and you want basic analytics, Goat Counter might be for you.
Launched in 2022, Goat Counter aims to attract a middle ground of analytics users who want to answer useful statistical questions such as “What content is popular” and “Should I write more of it” and not compromise privacy.
Born out of frustration with existing solutions found to be pricey and designed for advanced users Martin Tournoij says “I think it’s important to make the barrier of entry for software like this low as feasible to make actual meaningful inroads to “de-Google-fi” the internet a bit, and make pervasive tracking less common.”
Tournoij seems to harness the true spirit of the open-source entrepreneur. Goat Counter is private and lightweight, and you can self-host it. Goat Counter just might be the alternative analytics tool you’ve been looking to try — one thing though – you do need basic backend skills to use it.
Fathom
Fathom stands out as an analytics solution catering to users seeking fundamental business insights without the complexities of GA4.
Implementing Fathom’s tracking code seamlessly replaces GA4, allowing for a swift transition with the option to import UA data.
Focused on simplicity, Fathom efficiently loads a compact analytics embed code through CDN edge servers.
Built on open-source technology, Fathom’s lightweight framework ensures comprehensive website metric monitoring while prioritizing user privacy.
Compliant with stringent regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and PCER, it adeptly evades adblockers and enjoys robust support from a thriving developer community.
Fathom serves as an excellent choice for secure, privacy-conscious website analytics, whether deployed on the cloud or self-hosted, promising an easy setup and intuitive usability.
Clicky
Clicky has all the features of GA4 and in addition promises privacy-friendly, GDPR-compliant website analytics, and the opportunity to conduct the types of forensic analysis you’ll need if you want to investigate all of your user segments.
Available as an open-source plugin, Clicky gets around user-applied ad-blockers by re-routing their tracking code with a privacy-friendly, reverse proxy tracker configuration. This is a useful feature if your goal is to improve your search engine rank. Now that all your website visits are logged and not blocked by users, Clicky’s tracker can make a difference of up to 20% more recorded page visits.
Clicky’s UI gives you all the basic metrics and this makes it very lightweight for what you need in a simple stats app.
Olivia Oldham
Danny Watkinson
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