[BLOG] Test GA4 Analytics alternatives.

[white-gorilla]

Research alternatives to GA4.

Some of them are open source like plausible. It is usable as SAAS (90 euro/year) for 10k pageviews/month or self-hosted with Docker.

In my opinion, you should look for and keep at most 2 solutions to integrate and check:

• Whether the analytics meet the need (which needs to be defined) - The integration effort on the front and infra side if necessary.

List of solutions to evaluate quickly.

• [x] plausible
• [x] Matomo
• [x] Posthog
• [-] usefathom - The free trial requires a credit card registration.
• [-] Piano - No test is possible without contacting them first with a form.
• [-] Cloudflare Web Analytics

[white-gorilla]

Plausible

• Plausible dashboard with local tests
• About GPDR
• Pricing
• vs Google Analytics alternative
• vs Matomo
• vs Cloudflare Web Analytics

Pro

• Very simple and accessible
• Privacy focused and Open Source
• The main metrics, even if some of them are based on custom development (scroll).
• Available in SAAS and self-hosted
• Very reasonable price IMO (10k page views / month > 90 euros / year for 50 sites (domains))
• Perf.
• Only European: Estonia (Legal entity), Slovenia (CDN and DDoS protection), Germany (Hosting)

Cons

• Small team?
• Some micro outages of the service (status) ?
• I was not able to retrieve the search terms. It's more of a question on the M4M side. I asked the question.

[white-gorilla]

Matomo

• demo

You need the following credentials:

• login: d4d8d307e7
• pwd: vxncX@w&hRxTYf#9&3x%XJWyzKyuSE^5Q%BCWVL87vq%9BD#S*

Pro

• Open Source
• Available in SAAS and self-hosted

Cons

• As rich and complex as GA4, with hundreds of different metrics (is this a need for us)?
• A script 22 x bigger than the plausible one
• Rich, Matomo uses cookies and collects personal data by default, which requires consent management. To make Matamo GDPR compliant you need to disable 6 rules.

Phatom

The free trial requires a credit card registration.

[white-gorilla]

Posthog

Posthog is not GDPR compliant as it is. In the case of the use of the service in SAAS mode, we remain "Data Controllers" i.e. responsible for the control of the data.

To be RGPD compliant, a number of points need to be followed.

• First, Posthog recommends using the PostHog Cloud EU which allows data to be hosted in Germany. This version also has a free third party.
• A security configuration and recommendations are to be considered.
• User consent is required but...
• It is possible to store information useful to Posthog in memory rather than in cookies. The absence of persistence leads to a different behavior (data only persists for the duration of the page view. Returning users will be viewed as new users.)
• In the case of hosting outside the EU, you must activate theProperty Filter app

[white-gorilla]

@jonathlela

Initial issue, set up a GDPR compliant analytics tool on the blog.

2 options:

• Plausible as Service or hosted (compliant with GDPR de base).
• Posthog as Service (not GDPR compliant by default, see post above).
• Continue with GA4.

See #37

[white-gorilla]

@gaetansnl informs me that he received a notification of a problem on a runner github actions of ok-doc. I checked the yaml stacks, I don't see where there could be a link.