For most people choosing a tool for their website’s analytics is a no-brainer: Google Analytics. It’s free and almost everyone is using it. I mean… is there really even an alternative worth considering? Yes! And you really should, because using Google Analytics in most European countries is actually illegal at the moment. So let’s review 4 alternatives to Google Analytics (that are also free!) which you can implement today.

 

Matomo

Pro’s & Con’s

Price: FREE (when you host yourself) with optional paid add-ons

👍 Can import your Google Universal Analytics data (not possible with GA-4) 

👍 Comes with it’s own Tag Manager, Heatmaps, A/B testing, Ads-Analysis and more

👎 Free version requires technical skills to set up

Live demo: click here (opens in new page)

Looks like GA, but does more

If you want to make the switch from Google Analytics and don’t want to compromise on features, Matomo is your pick. You can choose to install the tool yourself or sign-up for the cloud-version that requires no technical knowledge, starting at €19/month. The dashboard looks very similar to Google Analytics, featuring most of your familiar reporting options: real-time visitor reports, behaviour reports, acquisition and goal-overviews are all there. Actually, it looks more like Google Analytics than the new GA-4!

But Matomo can do a lot more. It can track your website’s forms, tell you how much of your website’s video’s are played, monitor A/B-tests and even includes its own session recording and heatmaps! Do you also run a webshop? No worries: Matomo can track orders, products and abandoned carts too.

And last but not least, it has a Tag Manager build in. So if you have a cookie banner, custom scripts installed or run retargeting; there’s no need to keep using Google Tag Manager alongside.

Designed with privacy in mind

All those extra features are neat, but privacy is what makes Matomo really great. Its been designed with privacy in mind. Google on the other hand, tracks not only IP addresses but tons of other other browser information from visitors to your site. Google can track up to six other websites that person visited earlier that day and 50 websites they looked at in the last month! Google also stores data on servers in the US but Matomo stores all data in the EU. And when you self-host, in the country of your own choice.

GDPR (European privacy legislation) requires that you ask for consent before loading Google Analytics. Matomo can be used without when setup correctly. Which is great, because you don’t lose out of important user statistics. And when you setup Matomo to automatically anonymise data you can even comply with the strictest of EU privacy guideliness. You can be GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD and PECR compliant, all with 1 tool.

No data-limitations

Did you know that Google Analytics doesn’t show you 100% accurate data? GA implements data sampling once you’ve collected a certain amount of data. So you get a report that is an ‘estimate’ rather than the full picture. That’s not great if you are using this data to base business decisions on.

Example:

Google Analytics (free tier) has a data treshold of 500K sessions at the property level. When you collect 5 million page views or more, only 500K is accurate. The data for the remaining 4.5 million (90%) is an assumption based on the sample size. If you want more, you have to pay $150K/year for GA360 suite just to get accurate reporting.

Matomo doesn’t use data sampling. You get accurate reports based on all available data. And for free!

Panelbear

Pro’s & Con’s

Price: FREE (up to 1000 pageviews/month)

👍 Easier to set up compared to Matomo 

👍 Get notified when traffic surges or pages are slow in Slack, Discord or by e-mail alert

👎 Lacks features for larger (e-commerce) websites

Live demo: click here (opens in new page)

The lightweight alternative

Let’s say you have a small website and really don’t need all the bells and whistles. No digging into multi-level audience reporting but easy to understand data. Panelbear gives you a simple dashboard that summarizes the most important website metrics in real-time. On top of that, you can choose to track custom events to measure any type of interaction on your website.

In terms of privacy: Panelbear does not use tracking cookies and does not sell your user’s personal data. Heck, it even strips out personal data from analytics it collects automatically! Compared to Matomo, you get less flexibility in terms of setup you can tweak yourself. But rest assured: all data is stored in the EU.

Measure how fast your website loads

Even though its lightweight, you still get 5 tools in one. Not only does Panelbear look at your audience, but also looks at your website’s performance. Is your website up? How fast are your pages loading? How fast does it load on desktop vs. mobile? Panelbear gives you all these insights out of the box. No need to get extra tooling. And when there’s a sudden spike in traffic, you get alerts by e-mail or connect with your Slack of Discord.

Reports

You can get summaries of your website’s stats delivered straight to your inbox, on a weekly or monthly basis. And while all dashboards are private by default, you can also choose share your dashboard with your colleagues or team using a secret link.

 

Microanalytics

Pro’s & Con’s

Price: FREE (up to 5k pageviews/month)

👍 Easier to set up compared to Matomo 

👍 Get notified when traffic surges or pages are slow in Slack, Discord or by E-mail alert

👎 Lacks features for larger (e-commerce) websites

 

Same same, but different

When reviewing Microanalytics, we have a little bit of a deja-vu compared to Panelbear. It looks the same, but does a little bit more. For starters, you get up to 5K pageviews per month you can track for free compared to only 1000 with Panelbear. You can also dive a little deeper into your audience behaviours and acquisitions which you might need when saying goodbye to Google Analytics. Added bonus is the ability to export all your data in CSV-format, to use offline as well.

With Microanalytics you can track mutiple sites from the same dashboard. You can also share the dashboard with others, although we couldn’t yet figure out exactly how this works.

Data storage

Microanalytics stores user data in France. This is sufficiant to be GDPR, PECR and CCPA compliant but there is no option to change this compared to the other tools mentioned in this article.

Mixpanel

Pro’s & Con’s

Price: FREE (up to 100k tracked users/month)

👍 Great for tracking product adoption, allows for combining data from others sources

👍 Build custom dashboards and share them with your team(s)

👎 Overpowered for small sites, has a learning curve

Live demo: click here (opens in new page)

Dive deeper with dashboards

Mixpanel is not your standard website analytics tool. But it packs some very interesting features which makes it worth considering. Yes, you can use this to analyse user retention. And yes, you can also see what region your audience is from. But what this tool can also do for example, is if users from a certain city over time follow a certain funnel or end up buying a certain product on your website. It can find the optimal action that leads to people buying more products in your webshop. Now, how cool is that?

From web analytics to product analytics

Google Analytics was designed for tracking websites, not apps and products. As a result, you’ll probably need a different tool to track any product insights. Mixpanel can track these at the same time. For example: with Mixpanel you can track up to 2000 event properties, where Google Analytics can only do 20 (custom dimensions). So that’s a whole lot more buttons and interactions you can check! On top of that, you can have build (new) funnels in Mixpanel with data collected from the past 90 days. In comparison with GA, you will lose a lot of data when you don’t start tracking on time.

Data enrichment

When looking at product data, you want to combine webasite traffic wich orders that you might track with another CRM. Or maybe you want to enrich data from another source, to get better insights. Mixpanel connects to more than 50 tools, including: AWS, Zendesk, Facebook- and Google Ads and Hubspot. And it lets you import your Universal Google Analytics data, which is not even possible with GA4.

 

Conclusion

These 4 alternatives to Google Analytics, each with their own unique set of features, are great alternatives depending on your website’s needs. Without new legislation, Google will see more and more scrutiny in the nearby future and might be ruled illegal in more EU-countries. Instead of waiting for this to happen, its worth considering switching to a privacy friendly alternative and be prepared.