[coldcode]

It would be handy if people listed here all the alternatives that don't steal your customer info.

[rapnie]

https://usefathom.com/

https://goaccess.io/

https://github.com/NYPL/google-analytics-proxy

http://matomo.org/

https://ackee.electerious.com/

https://www.goatcounter.com/

https://count.ly/

[gramakri]

I gave many of these a visit.

fathom - Looks great. I am OK with closed source products (my motivation is self-hosting/privacy) but the direction is not clear to me. Maybe they will have a blog about it at some point - https://github.com/usefathom/fathom/issues/268. Having multiple code bases is going to be super hard.

goaccess.io - this analyses web logs

google-analytics-proxy - project is dead

matomo - this is what i use now and it works great. has a lot of quirks but if you spend some time, you can make it work.

ackee, goatcounter - simple but looks like this does not track users/sessions. it's mostly for page hits.

countly - looks good if you are enterprise. there is no pricing :(

freshlytics (from another thread) - page says it's in beta and not production ready

[Carpetsmoker]

GoatCounter author here: doing some form of session tracking is on the roadmap; check back in a few months. The project is still quite new, with the first "real" release only being last week :-)

As for Fathom, I find that last "since that people are confused"-comment rather funny, since their messaging on this has been confused for almost a year, haha

[gramakri]

Will do! I am already following your project :)

[whycombagator]

- Simpleanalytics[0] (also commented elsewhere in this thread)

- Goatcounter also came up a few days ago on HN and got a lot of traction/discussion[1]

I can't find the comment it was posted in, but a HN user did a good comparison of a few privacy-focused analytics tools[2]

[0] https://simpleanalytics.com/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22044854

[2] https://dev.to/hmhrex/a-comparison-of-the-top-3-privacy-focu...

Edit: I found the OG comment for the blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716544

[dvko]

If you're using WordPress, there is https://wordpress.org/plugins/koko-analytics/. Open-source, self hosted, no external services & very performant.

[sdan]

Building https://sdan.io/pingpong. We're dedicated to building the fastest client-side load analytics engine available. If you want to stay in the loop on how development is going please do so! https://forms.gle/MhojBWWfdiWjZatC7

[drusepth]

I think including prices in this list would significantly improve it.

[protonfish]

Or just use server log analytics. Client-side analytics are a significant contributor to the proliferation of JavaScript bloat and unnecessary 3rd party cookies.

[Carpetsmoker]

Depending on which solution you use; some of them are just a few KB, which is not so much.

Doing log-analysis has its own drawbacks: not everyone has access to them, bot traffic will be a lot higher, and certain information is hard to access (like screen size). You can't always "just" use it.

[guelo]

I've been surprised lately by how much more pleasant, readable and usable the news/blog-web is with JavaScript turned off. JavaScript is basically just used for the user-hostile ad-tech.

[Mirioron]

I've been wondering about this recently: perhaps we'd actually be better off with simpler browsers that did less so that the websites would do less?

[anderspitman]

I've been thinking the same thing, and started[0] experimenting[1] with some ideas. I think it be fun to make a web browser that implements a few HTML tags, flexbox and a few other CSS primitives (no animations), and no JS. Sites that are compatible with it would still work on current browsers.

[0] https://anderspitman.net/19/#netcatable

[1] https://anderspitman.net/17/#curlable

[dvko]

It's why I'm somewhat against WASM, even though it's very cool from a technical standpoint. It makes the web even more of an operating system, where I'd like it to be less.

[cholmon]

I recently found https://text.npr.org/ (linked down in the footer of the main NPR site) and it made me very happy.

[Semaphor]

You automatically get that if you visit them from the EU and decline tracking, it’s amazing :)

[awb]

Agreed if you're already self-hosting. However, I don't know of a JS-free solution if you're hosting on a 3rd party like GitHub pages or Netlify for example.

(Netlify does sell access to log data but it looks expensive for most hobby / personal sites)

[Carpetsmoker]

You can probably use the "tracking pixel" method with at least some analytics tools. This is a very old which probably predates even the invention of JavaScript.

Basically, if it accepts a GET with query parameters, it should work.

[awb]

Right, but don't you still need to own a server in order to log these GET requests?

[Carpetsmoker]

You can do it with one of the hosted services. I don't know which ones support it exactly, but GoatCounter does (although it's kind of an undocumented feature until I merge PR #122).

[awb]

Cool, I saw GoatCounter on HN a few days ago. I've looked into ways to get a user count without JS and without paying for hosting, but no luck yet. If you find out what free services support it I'd love to know.

[lgrebe]

https://simpleanalytics.com/

[soumyadeb]

Disclaimer: I am the founder of RudderStack (https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server)

With our open-source data collection framework like RudderStack (an alternative to Segment), dumping data into a warehouse (Redshift/BigQuery/Druid etc) and sticking another open-source visualization layer on top (e.g. like SuperSet), it is possible to put together an alternative to Google Analytics. One of our early users did it and we wrote a blog about it

https://rudderstack.com/blog/open-source-analytics/

[pcmaffey]

Or roll your own: https://www.pcmaffey.com/roll-your-own-analytics

[40four]

https://github.com/sheshbabu/freshlytics