Open Source Google Analytics Alternatives For Your Next Side Project

After finishing a side project and just before deploying it to the poduction, first thing we do is adding the analytics code.

It is exciting to real-time visitors on our website, tinkering with our project, which country they are from, source, and dig deep into those insights.

While Google Analytics has been the go-to platform for years, concerns over privacy, data ownership, and complexity have led many to seek alternatives. Among these, open-source solutions offer transparency, customization, and control.

Here, we are comparing four leading open-source Google Analytics alternatives: Plausible, Fathom Analytics, Umami Analytics, and Pirsch Analytics.

Few common things between all these four tools is:

• These are open source alternatives.
• You can self-host these.
• Low to no pricing for small side projects.
• Privacy friendly and GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant.

One important thing to note: these 4 tools might offer some surface level event tracking. But do not offer deep insights as other advanced analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, and PostHog.

Plausible Analytics

Plausible stands out for its commitment to privacy and simplicity. It offers a lightweight and open-source web analytics tool that doesn’t use cookies and fully complies with GDPR, making it an attractive option for privacy-focused websites. As far as I remember Plausible and Fathom both are widely used. I believe that Plausible is the first open source google analytics alternatives. I might be wrong.

GitHub • Demo • Documentation

Umami Analytics

Umami is a self-hosted web analytics solution designed to provide essential metrics in a more user-friendly and privacy-respecting way than Google Analytics.

The best thing about Umami is—being open-source and self-hosted, it's free to use. If you don't want to self host, they have free tier pricing too.

GitHub • Demo • Documentation

Pirsch Analytics

Pirsch prioritizes user privacy. It uses the HTTP protocol to identify visitors, creating a unique hash for each one. This hash is derived from the visitor's IP address, User-Agent, and additional data points, guaranteeing that all statistics remain anonymous.

Pirsch can bypass the adblockers because it uses server-side integration. Instead of relying on JavaScript running in the visitor's browser, you can keep your site lean and improve page speed. That way, you don't loose any data.

It also provides a comprehensive set of metrics compared to others—including technology used by visitors, sources, and more.

GitHub • Demo • Documentation

Fathom Analytics

I remember fathom because few years ago I read a blog post talking about analytics without cookies. And went into a rabbit hole of readin 3-4 more articles written by them.

I became fan of their approach and aggressiveness towards building a product. Their approcah is like a movement. I will definitely recommend reading their blog.

Demo

Update: Fathom is not open source any more. But I still like them.

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I listed these 4 because I like how easy they are to setup, manage, and customize. Also, you can use single instance to track multiple projects/website.

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Wait, I found this new one recently.

openpanel.dev Analytics

I haven't explored this one yet but seems very promising. I loved the sub-heading on their landing page "The power of Mixpanel, the ease of Plausible and nothing from Google Analytics" 😄.

GitHub • Demo • Documentation

Hope to see you using one of these in your next side projects!