Matomo

What Matomo does

Matomo, formerly called Piwik, is the most complete traditional web analytics suite in this category. Its reports will feel familiar to anyone coming from Google Analytics: acquisition channels, campaigns, goals, ecommerce, segments, visitor logs and visitor profiles, together with a built-in tag manager and a free plugin that imports historical Google Analytics data.

It is extended through plugins. Many are free, but some of the features people compare with Google Analytics 360 or Hotjar, including heatmaps, session recording, funnels, custom reports and media analytics, are paid premium plugins with their own commercial license. They are not part of the GPL core.

Privacy and cookies

By default the Matomo tracker sets first-party cookies to recognize returning visitors. They can be turned off with the disableCookies option, although Matomo notes that short-lived technical cookies, such as a session or consent cookie, may still be set, and that unique-visitor counts become less accurate without cookies.

Matomo states that it can be used without a consent banner only where local rules allow it, citing the consent exemption for audience measurement in France and similar positions in Spain and Italy, and only with privacy settings such as cookie-free tracking and IP anonymization in place. Its documentation explains the settings involved.

Self-hosting Matomo

Matomo On-Premise runs on an ordinary PHP web server. Matomo 6 needs PHP 8.1 or later and MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+, and there is also an official Docker image. The project publishes sizing guidance: about 2 CPUs, 2 GB of RAM and 50 GB of SSD storage for up to 100,000 pageviews a month, and 4 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM and 250 GB of SSD for up to a million, with separate application and database servers recommended beyond that.

The self-hosted version has no limits on users or hits. Free support is through the community forum; paid support plans are available.

Hosted version

Matomo Cloud is the official hosted service and includes the premium plugins depending on the plan. According to the README it has a 21-day free trial; there is no permanent free plan.

Limitations

The advanced behavior features are paid add-ons when you self-host, so a like-for-like comparison with a hosted Google Analytics setup can cost more than expected. Cookie-free tracking needs to be configured rather than being the default, and large sites need more than one server.

Who it suits

Matomo suits organizations that want detailed reporting, ecommerce tracking and full ownership of their data on a familiar PHP and MySQL stack, such as public bodies, universities, agencies and WordPress or WooCommerce sites, which have official plugins.