Open source alternatives to Google Analytics

What Google Analytics does

Google Analytics 4 records website and app activity as events and turns it into reports on traffic, acquisition, engagement and conversions. Explorations allow custom analysis such as funnels, raw events can be exported to BigQuery, and it connects directly with Google Ads for audiences and conversion tracking. GA4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data for standard properties on 1 July 2023 and for Analytics 360 properties on 1 July 2024.

Why people look for an alternative

• Data handled by a third party. Visitor data is collected and processed by Google rather than on your own infrastructure. After complaints filed by the privacy group noyb in August 2020, several EU data protection authorities ruled on Google Analytics in 2022 and 2023, including the Austrian authority, the French CNIL and the Italian Garante, which found transfers of data to the United States unlawful at the time. Those decisions came before the EU–US Data Privacy Framework of 10 July 2023, after which the CNIL says transfers to certified US companies no longer need extra safeguards. Many organizations still prefer to keep analytics data in their own hands.
• Cookies and consent. GA4 sets cookies, so sites in the EU normally show a consent banner, and when visitors decline, consent mode fills gaps with modelled rather than measured data.
• Limited retention of detailed data. On standard properties, the user-level and event data used in Explorations and funnel reports is kept for 2 or 14 months. Standard aggregated reports are not affected.
• Sampling and thresholding. Explorations are sampled when a query covers more than 10 million events on a standard property, and GA4 hides rows in some reports when user counts are low.
• Complexity. Many site owners only need traffic, sources and a few conversions, and find GA4’s event model and interface more than they need.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Hosting and cookies. Can you self-host it or choose EU hosting, and does it work without cookies or persistent identifiers? This affects whether you need a consent banner.
2. Retention. How long is raw data kept, and can you keep it indefinitely on your own storage?
3. Complete data. Are reports computed on all events at your traffic level, without sampling?
4. The GA4 features you actually use. Goals and conversions, funnels, ecommerce revenue, UTM campaigns, app tracking, raw export or SQL access.
5. Moving your history. Plausible, Matomo and Swetrix can import historical Google Analytics data, which makes switching easier.

Which one to choose

For a content or marketing site that wants clear traffic reports without cookies, Plausible, Umami and GoatCounter are the simplest options; GoatCounter is the easiest to self-host and Umami has the most permissive license. Matomo is the closest match to Google Analytics in depth, with ecommerce, a tag manager and a visitor log, but it uses cookies by default. Open Web Analytics also runs on PHP and MySQL and includes heatmaps and session recordings in its open source code. For the smallest possible setup, Liwan is a single binary with a built-in database, while Ackee and Shynet offer minimal cookie-free dashboards. If you also need product analytics, session replay or error tracking, look at PostHog, OpenPanel, Rybbit and Swetrix; for mobile apps with crash reporting and push notifications, Countly.