A list of free self-hosted Google Analytics alternatives

I was looking for Google Analytics alternatives I could self host, for situations where paid analytics services are over budget.

The following are my notes on a few solutions that can be self-hosted, are open source and free.

Feel free to leave your thoughts or recommend other tools in the comments!

Matomo Analytics

The classic one. It’s quite advanced but maybe a bit too complex? You might end up never looking at most pages (like with Google Analytics)
The UI attempts to be modern but still feels old. It lacks of proper UI/UX design IMO
It’s been around for ages, definitely stable
It might require a cookie consent for GDPR compliance. From what I understand it’s possible to configure Matomo so that consent is not required but it’s not what you get out of the box
Real-time stats: there’s a page that shows recent visits but it lacks a count of how many users are online (it only shows active users in the past 30 minutes)
Actively developed by the company that offers the cloud product
Built with PHP and requires MySQL. Easy deployment only if you already have a PHP setup, I’d say

Somewhat less advanced when compared to Matomo, but it still probably has everything you need
Easy to use and beautiful design
Born as a cloud product but released as open source for self-hosting, with all the features. The product has been around since 2019 and the company behind it has grown a lot recently
+1 for weekly email reports and reports about traffic spikes
It features a real-time dashboard and shows the number of current visitors
No cookie consent required
Built with Elixir, uses both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse as database systems, which are not easy requirements. Still quite easy to deploy with the provided Docker Compose file

It seems to be similar to Plausible but with less features overall
It’s been around since 2020 and it’s actively developed
According to the website a paid cloud product is coming soon, which I think is good for the future and sustainability of the project
Similarly to Plausible: nice design, real-time dashboard, count of online users
No cookie consent required
Written in Node.js, works with both PostgreSQL and MySQL. A bit easier to deploy than Plausible especially because there’s no ClickHouse requirement
Very promising overall!

The open source Lite version of the Fathom service
It’s very limited in terms of features compared to the full product (which went closed-source), so I would consider it only for very basic needs
Still, nicely designed
No cookie consent required
Should be easy to deploy even without Docker, being a Go application. Uses SQLite as a database (!)

Another product from 2019, again similar to Plausible but less advanced
It seems to work well for tracking multiple websites in a single dashboard
No real-time dashboard but there’s an active visitors count
No cookie consent required
Development is kind of active but I’m seeing only bug fixes in the past year
Built with Node.js and requires MongoDB. Should be easy to deploy provided you know how to manage a MongoDB instance

Nice UI. Basic features you need are probably there, but…
It seems it hasn’t received much attention lately, I’m not sure where the project is going
Built with Python, requires PostgreSQL

This is a weird one: basic service, with a basic-but-charming old-school UI
Not very advanced, e.g. you can only filter by page
No online users count/no real-time dashboard
The developer doesn’t work on the project full-time anymore, but fixes are still delivered from what I can tell
There’s a free managed service but only for non-commercial use
No cookie consent required
Built with Go ❤ + SQLite/PostgreSQL