8 Google Analytics Alternatives (Enterprise and Open Source)

Have you ever watched a foreign movie with no subtitles? You only have one side of the story—the moving pictures. You have some idea of what’s going on, but you need subtitles to really understand what’s going on. The same is true for Google Analytics. Google Analytics can show you helpful information around your website visitors such as monthly pageviews, time on page, bounce rate, referrers, and traffic source, but it can’t give you a comprehensive picture of the customer journey.

Google Analytics is the de facto web analytics choice for most companies. It’s a user-friendly product with nice capabilities out of the box, but its limitations are quickly apparent to those looking to do more with their data, and it’s susceptible to ad-blockers.

Moreover, Google Analytics raises data privacy concerns and compromises regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). When you use Google Analytics, you give up data ownership, allowing Google to use the site-traffic and user-behavior data from your website for their own purposes.

The good news is you aren’t stuck with Google Analytics. The industry is moving toward more flexible and privacy-friendly analytics tooling. Here, we explore different Google Analytics alternatives—including enterprise SaaS and open-source options—providing both product and web analytics options for your company. Most of these options include a free plan to get started and paid plans that include more functionality.

Best Google Analytics alternatives: Enterprise

Enterprise options are your best bet if you are looking for customizable tools that handle security, hosting, and maintenance costs. Here are some enterprise alternatives to Google Analytics:

1. Adobe Analytics

Source: Adobe Analytics

What it is: Adobe Analytics provides a set of tools that lets you collect, measure, and explore data you can use to predict traffic and gain insights. It has an interactive analytics workspace that helps you easily drag and drop data tables, visualizations, and components to create custom analytics dashboards.

Adobe Analytics offers an advanced report pattern that enables you to build and analyze your user journey. The real-time segmentation feature uses a machine learning model to predict customer behavior and reduce churn risk. It also has a flow analysis chart that helps you understand how your customers navigate each page of your site.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

2. Mixpanel

Source: Mixpanel

What it is: Mixpanel is an analytics tool that lets businesses dive deep into user behavior on the website and mobile applications. Mixpanel lets you group your users based on actions they carried or did not carry out on your website and compare trends easily.

With its retention report feature, you can see what group of website users stick around and what keeps them interested. Its dashboards and alerts can be customized in real-time for your team, and you can be notified when metrics change. Mixpanel offers more than 50 integrations, including Content Management Systems (CMS), messaging and marketing automation platforms, databases, customer support systems, etc.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

RudderStack’s Mixpanel integration makes it easy for you to send data from every website and app to Mixpanel and every other tool in your stack.

3. Looker

Source: Looker

Looker is a business intelligence and big data analytics platform that provides solutions for exploring, analyzing, and visualizing data in real-time. Looker’s web analytics tool empowers you to create interactions and dynamic dashboards (multiple users can work at the same time). It gives you a 360-degree view of what your customers are doing (for example, unique visitors, session counts, engagements per session).

The dashboard has a number of filters that enable you to slice and dice your web data and get deep, valuable business insights (for example, a property filter for different properties in your website). It also provides on-premise and cloud-hosted options.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

You can use RudderStack’s warehouse destinations to easily send website and app data to your data warehouse for web analytics and complex Business Intelligence in Looker.

Best Google Analytics alternatives: Open-Source

While enterprise tools are nice to have, these open-source Google Analytics alternatives give you control, flexibility, access to the codebase, and come with friendlier pricing options.

4. PostHog

Source: PostHog

What it is: PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform that works directly with your data warehouse and event pipeline to keep you in control of your customer data. It allows you to automatically track different events like clicks, page views, forms, and taps. With PostHog, you can create flexible dashboards to display your product performance metrics like purchases, sign-ups, and conversions. PostHog is excellent if you want to host yourself, with the option to move to the cloud, private cloud deployment, or even keep the data in your infrastructure.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

“PostHog is a product analytics platform, rather than just a website analytics platform. Google Analytics is often used by marketing teams to track things like page views, but PostHog can track a much wider range of events and offers specialized tools to help Product and Engineering teams understand why things happen in their product.” — Joe Martin, Head of Product Marketing at PostHog

Check out RudderStack’s PostHog integration to easily send data from every website and app to PostHog and every other tool in your stack.

5. Metabase

Source: Metabase

What it is: Metabase is an open-source business intelligence and analytics tool that connects your database and provides an easy way for everyone (SQL expert or not) to get answers and learn from the data. It has an interactive dashboard that you can share and automatically create reports. Metabase is not just open-source but also offers cloud and enterprise hosting options.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

You can also integrate Google Analytics by adding a database connection and get answers and insights on your data.

Open-source web analytics alternatives

The above tools are specifically for product analytics, but if you are looking out for open-source web analytics alternatives, you can check out the following tools:

6. Plausible

Source: Plausible

What it is: Plausible is an open-source web analytics tool that lets startups, freelancers, and bloggers measure website traffic metrics with an easy-to-use dashboard. This tool uses a single page to present detailed website statistics according to user engagement on your site. The Plausible script is less than 1kb, so you don’t have to worry about it slowing down your site.

With Plausible, your site visitors’ personal data privacy is guaranteed, it does not track users with unique identifiers or require cookies to store data. Plausible uses a public roadmap for feature suggestions and an active community you can engage in.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

7. Matomo

Source: Matomo

What it is: Matomo describes itself as a “powerful web analytics platform” that keeps you in control of your website data. Matomo secures data from your internal websites and intranet applications.

This tool also doesn’t limit data when it comes to tracked websites, reports, segments, goals, page views, number of users, etc. It has easy integration with over 100+ technologies.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

Use RudderStack’s Matomo integration to easily send data from your website to Matomo and every other tool in your stack.

8. Open Web Analytics

Source: Open Web Analytics

What it is: Open Web Analytics is an open-source web analytics platform that lets you analyze and track your site and app visitors. It offers flexibility to monitor your analytics with a simple and easy-to-use dashboard.

Open Web Analytics allows you to define and track unlimited site actions and interactions. There is a heatmap feature to show you where site visitors click on your website. Open Web Analytics performs custom segments via a data access API and integrates with CRMs like WordPress and MediaWiki.

How it differs from Google Analytics:

Fuel analytics with unified data collection from a customer data platform

Every analytics tool has a unique set of features and functionalities. In this article we focused on the web and product analytics tools teams use to drive website and app optimizations that enhance the customer experience. Because different teams have different preferences and requirements, it’s not uncommon for a company to leverage multiple analytics solutions, and analytics tools are only a small piece of the puzzle. The initial stack at most companies also includes a CRM tool and a Marketing Automation tool. From there things get increasingly complex, and each new tool requires its own integration. This results in integration maintenance challenges, reduced website and app performance, and data inconsistency across tools in the stack.

You can avoid these problems by unifying data collection with a customer data platform like RudderStack. With RudderStack Event Stream, you instrument your websites and applications once to capture event data in a consistent format and automatically distribute it to every tool in your stack. With a unified data layer you’ll: