Best Open Source Web Analytics Tools for business owners to track their site stats & web traffic. These web analytics tools are free, open source or low cost tools that can help smaller businesses manage website growth with ease.
Focus on your business, not your web analytics. Our research identified the best open source web analytics tools for businesses of any size. We’ll show you which open source software works best, how much it costs and how to get started using it.
Matomo
Let’s start with the open source application that rivals Google Analytics for functions: Matomo (formerly known as Piwik). Matomo does most of what Google Analytics does, and chances are it offers the features that you need.
Those features include metrics on the number of visitors hitting your site, data on where they come from (both on the web and geographically), the pages from which they leave, and the ability to track search engine referrals. Matomo also offers many reports, and you can customize the dashboard to view the metrics that you want to see.
To make your life easier, Matomo integrates with more than 65 content management, e-commerce, and online forum systems, including WordPress, Magneto, Joomla, and vBulletin, using plugins. For any others, you can simply add a tracking code to a page on your site.
You can test-drive Matomo or use a hosted version.
Plausible
Plausible is a newer kid on the open source analytics tools block. It’s lean, it’s fast, and only collects a small amount of information — that includes numbers of unique visitors and the top pages they visited, the number of page views, the bounce rate, and referrers. Plausible is simple and very focused.
What sets Plausible apart from its competitors is its heavy focus on privacy. The project creators state that the tool doesn’t collect or store any information about visitors to your website, which is particularly attractive if privacy is important to you.
GoAccess: Terminal based log analyzer
GoAccess is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.
GoAccess is a log analyzer, that runs from the terminal, unlike many other cloud-based projects in this list, It does not require complex installation or database. GoAccess is written in C so expect the best performance and speed.
GoAccess supports all known weblogs format like Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3, Elastic Load Balancing, and CloudFront, It displays real-time analytics for the server, visitors, requests, hits, bandwidth, static resources’ usage, IPs, browsers, platforms, referrals, geolocations, virtual hosts metrics, and Google’s search keywords.
W3Perl: Libre (Open source) logs analyzer
W3Perl is a true libre (Open source) server logs analyzer software that supports many logfiles types including web servers, FTP, SSH, Mail, Squid, and DHCP. W3Perl as its a logfile analyzer it does not require JavaScript tracking software installed at the websites it needs to track.
W3Perl is fast and comes with nifty clean user-interface even though it may look old comparing to the current web design standards. It has plugins to extend its features like geolocation analysis, visitor screen sizes. It provides rich reporting tools with export and notification options (email). It’s easy to install as it supports many platforms (RPM/Debian package available for Unix, binary files for Windows (IIS/Apache/Abyss/Local), pkg for macOS).
Countly
Countly bills itself as a “secure web analytics” platform. While I can’t vouch for its security, Countly does a solid job of collecting and presenting data about your site and its visitors.
Heavily targeting marketing organizations, Countly tracks data that is important to marketers. That information includes site visitors’ transactions, as well as which campaigns and sources led visitors to your site. You can also create metrics that are specific to your business. Countly doesn’t forgo basic web analytics; it also keeps track of the number of visitors on your site, where they’re from, which pages they visited, and more.
You can use the hosted version of Countly or grab the source code from GitHub and self-host the application. And yes, there are differences between the hosted and self-hosted versions of Countly.
PostHog for quick setup of self-hosted analytics
PostHog / PostHog GitHub / MIT license / 3.4k stars
PostHog is a self-hosted, open source analytics platform that allows for extremely easy deployment. You can deploy the tool directly to Heroku in one click. This sets it apart from a lot of other open source analytics tools that have a more involved setup process and require more knowledge to get up and running. PostHog works well for teams new to the open source world.
A weakness of PostHog is that you might be limited if you are building out marketing attribution with open source analytics. PostHog doesn’t currently have email link tracking or ad campaign tracking, so you will be missing a subset of your data when trying to understand your marketing campaigns better.
OWA (Open Web Analytics): GDPR complaint self-hosted open-source web analytics
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is self-hosted open-source web analytics solution, Its completely Libre software, and the only GDPR complaint solution on this list. Open Web Analytics is a developer-friendly written in PHP and offers developers different options for extending and implementing it through flexible powerful API.
Open Web Analytics is supported by many shared servers, It’s easy to install, configure and use. Open Web Analytics provides official support to WordPress and MediaWiki with plugins easy to install/ integrate.
Open Web Analytics is not just an analytics solution, its complete web analytics platform that supports developers to make extensions, and integrate it with their websites. It provides several trackers as well including custom action tracking script, browser-friendly JavaScript tracker, campaign tracker, eCommerce tracker, and conversion tracker.
AWStats
AWStats is a log analyzer for websites, FTP, mail servers, It generates graphical analytical reports from the server logs. AWStats provides graphical reports and statistics about visits, referrals, search engine referrals, search engines search keywords, visits time, most visited pages, visits durations, browsers (agents), platforms, screen size, HTTP errors, and countries. It has several plugins provided by the core developers and by the community.
AWStats is accessible from command-line terminals or through its web port which uses CGI, is released under GPL Licenase. It has been around for years but still getting frequent updates.
Conclusion
One of the best ways to make informed decisions about how to improve a website is to measure what works and what doesn’t. In this article, we’ll talk about the ten best open source web analytics tools available and show you how to get started with each.