Do you want to know about the best open source web analytics software in the market? The internet is full of such tools and you can spend your entire day checking them out. All such tools, even local ones like Google Analytics, offer dashboards to monitor website statistics like page views, user trends and many more. But when you use such software on a small scale, these dashboards become useless. They consume too much memory without giving out any useful information. This is where open source analytics tools come into play. They provide you with just enough information and power to keep your websites functional and debug potential issues in them before they become a serious problem to you and your business.
If you want to learn about open source analytics tools or read an article on open source analytics dashboard, then you’re in the right place. We’ve made a list of the best open source web analytics tools on the market. Open source means you can modify it and add your own features.
Open Web Analytics
The name of this software says it all. It’s an open-source and free web analytics tool that gives you complete control to analyze and organize your website’s traffic.
With this software, you can track, manage, and analyze how your web visitors use your platform.
But that’s not all.
First-party control is possible with Open Web Analytics. In other words, you can run this analytics tool alongside your website or under your web domain.
OWA allows an optional third-party mode for its cookie model, but Google Analytics doesn’t. Instead, Google Analytics has a strict restriction for the first-party cookie model.
The OWA tool provides a tailored web analytics framework for its customers. Hence, you can tweak its features to meet your business demands, regardless of your industry.
Are you into WordPress and MediaWiki websites? Then, it would help if you considered this analytic tool because it can help you with your CRM systems thanks to its PHP and MySQL backend technology.
You can also download in-depth reports, standard metrics, and dimensions about your website from the tool’s dashboard. Plus, the OWA tool comes with a click heat map that helps to identify the key areas your web visitors click often.
The Open Web Analytics tool supports an extensive data API, allowing you to access raw data and change it to meaningful reports. The only snag is that it takes a lot of work. However, you can’t access such raw data on the Google Analytics platform.
Matomo
Formerly called Piwik, Matomo is an open-source and free analytics application that matches the Google Analytics tool head to head. It’s a fantastic Google Analytics alternative to consider if you want to get a comprehensive report of your web visitors.
The tool runs on a MySQL/PHP web server with a secure and transparent framework that can help you limit your risks. Plus, it has loads of contributors who have tested it and are willing to guide new users on the best way to use the platform.
With Matomo, there’s no data sampling, which translates to 100 percent accurate data and impactful decisions for your business.
It’s easy to extend and customize your business needs on Matomo—thanks to its dozens of tools. There’s no data limit with this tool, so you can have an unlimited number of users, segments, and websites.
If you’re a newbie looking for a simple system, you found one with Matomo. It has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for you to navigate around the platform quickly.
Matomo offers an in-depth content analysis that helps you get insights into how your website content is performing.
In contrast, Google Analytics doesn’t offer in-depth content analysis. Matomo also comes with a “reporting” feature, which is missing in Google Analytics.
Roll-up reporting helps merge all your site’s data into one interface. This function is helpful if you’re running multiple websites under a single account.
Matomo comes with a heatmap feature that enables you to picture every user’s behavior on your website.
When it comes to security and user privacy, Matomo is an excellent option to consider because it’s GDPR compliant—unlike Google Analytics.
This open-source Google Analytics alternative comes with different packages:
- On-Premise
- Cloud
The On-Premise option is free, but it has its limits, while the cloud version offers $35.38 per month for 50K page views. It also has a 21-day trial period that doesn’t require your credit card.
Wasabi
Wasabi is a real-time, open-source, 100% API-driven, A/B testing platform by Intuit. The open-source testing software allows users to own their data and experiment across the web, mobile, and desktop. Users utilize Wasabi because it’s fast, scalable, and easy to use for organizations of all sizes.
Developers lean toward Wasabi for A/B testing because it is 100% API-driven and can be developed in any programming language and environment. The software has been tested for years with products like TurboTax and QuickBooks.
While Wasabi is a proven open-source platform that can run on your servers or in the cloud, it is no longer under active development or supported by Intuit, as of August 28, 2019.
Grouparoo for integrating customer data with cloud-based tools
Grouparoo/Grouparoo Github/ Mozilla Public License 2.0/ 428 stars
Grouparoo is an open-source Reverse ETL solution that makes it easy to send data from your data warehouse to cloud-based marketing, sales and customer platforms like Mailchimp, Salesforce and Zendesk. Grouparoo integrates with any tech stack; you can configure your setup locally, commit changes, and deploy with git – just like how you’d deploy DBT projects. There’s also a web-based user interface to support complex configurations.
AWStats
Web server log files provide a rich vein of information about visitors to your site, but tapping into that vein isn’t always easy. That’s where AWStats comes to the rescue. While it lacks the most modern look and feel, AWStats more than makes up for that with breadth of data it can present.
That information includes the number of unique visitors, how long those visitors stay on the site, the operating system and web browsers they use, the size of a visitor’s screen, and the search engines and search terms people use to find your site. AWStats can also tell you the number of times your site is bookmarked, track the pages where visitors enter and exit your sites, and keep a tally of the most popular pages on your site.
These features only scratch the surface of AWStats’s capabilities. It also works with FTP and email logs, as well as syslog files. AWStats can gives you a deep insight into what’s happening on your website using data that stays under your control.
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.
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. You can read more about that here.
Conclusion:
There are hundreds of open source analytics tools available, there are also free open source analytics tools that are comparable to premium software. Not all open source analytics tools are created equal, that’s why I decided to research the different analytics platforms and put together a list of the best ones.