Google Analytics ("GA") is free and easy to use. The reason it's free is because Google is using you to get to your users. Every time someone visits your site without a blocker, Google fingerprints their browser and tracks them across sites they visit. This information is used to send that person targeted ads and manipulate them into buy crap they don't need.

So how do we get the convenience and benefits of analytics that GA provides, without selling out our users? Fortunately, there are a lot of small projects and companies that are popping up to address this.

The Criteria

When I started looking for an alternative, these were my main criteria:

1. Needed to be very easy to get started. GA is sign up for an account then copy/paste a small script.

2. Offered as a hosted service. I've tried self hosting in the past, but devops just doesn't interest me as a hobby. I'm fine doing it for a few things, but not every service I need.

3. No vendor lock-in. Preferably this means open source, but exporting all my data easily to a common format would also work.

4. Respect user privacy and agency.

The Contenders

Based on my quick research, here are the projects that caught my eye:

1. GoAccess. Uses server-side logs. Open source. This would work for a lot of my projects, and eventually I'd like to use it, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of figuring that all out right now. See Appendix A.

2. GoatCounter. Dead simple GA alternative. Source code is available for self-hosting. Free for personal use. This is what I went with.

3. SimpleAnalytics. Nice GA alternative. Expensive (19USD/mo). Source is not available.

4. Matomo. Old guard GA alternative. Open source. Lots of features. Hosted is expensive (19USD/mo starting tier). Looks complicated. PHP.

The Choice

In the end, GoatCounter looked the most promising, so I tried it first. I immediately fell in love. It took 5 minutes to set up my account (didn't even have to create a password), and copy the script into my site. The UI is very simple and intuitive. It shows me the information I care about, without all the noise. It's so refreshing. Been using it for a week with no issues. My plan is to remove GA from this site, after the next time I have a high-traffic post, so I can compare them under load.

If you use GoatCounter, please consider signing up for one of the paid options, or at least sending a few $ their way. The internet needs more services like this. I'm not affiliated with GoatCounter in any way; just a happy customer.

Caveats

None of the GA alternatives I've seen have all the features GA offers. Personally, I realized that I only ever look at the basics anyway. I want to know how many people are visiting my site, where they are coming from, which pages they are visiting, and some basic device information.

You can go down a deep rabbit hole of analyzing how users navigate your site, where they click, where they drop off, etc, etc. But in my opinion, many of these paths lead to you manipulating your users into using your site the way you want them to. If you have good content, people will read your site. If you have a good product that solves a real problem, people will buy it. Sure, you should follow good design principles to make your site usable, but no amount of design can fix a site that doesn't offer any value.

Addendum

It's funny how sometimes we use things in subtly different ways because of a large jump in performance. Here's what I mean. I've never once tried checking my GA numbers from my phone browser. I never really thought about that, I just didn't do it. But with GoatCounter I noticed that I had started using my phone to check my daily pageviews. After a bit of thinking, I realized that I simply have 0 faith that the GA site would provide a good experience in a mobile browser, based on it's desktop performance and the performance of other Google products. I imagine it would be slow and painful. My subconscious had ruled it out before I ever even considered it. GoatCounter gives the exact opposite impression. It screams simplicity and performance, just begging to be used on an entry-level smartphone.

Appendix A - Server logs vs SaaS analytics

When choosing server- vs client-side analytics, here are the things I think about:

1. Not all static-site services (GitHub Pages, Netlify, etc) offer access to the server logs, and if they do sometimes it costs money. Client-side gets around this.

2. Server-side is nice because you don't need JavaScript.

3. Client-side is nice because you can get more information, such as screen size.

4. If you're using a CDN (like CloudFlare), using server-side will dramatically throw off your numbers, because not all requests are hitting your servers.