5 Great Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2020

Google Analytics is probably the most powerful website analytics tool available to date, and it’s free to use. It’s super easy to get started, and even if you just want to see how many visitors you get it’s probably the best alternative. 

Integrated with other services like Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager you get a super powerful tool with almost endless possibilities in terms of tracking and data mining. 

But some webmasters might want to find alternatives to Google Analytics. Some SEOs working with large networks of websites might not want to have them all connected with Google Analytics or any other Google products or services for that matter. There might also be other reasons since you will be sharing a lot of data with Google. 

Regardless of your opinion, we have created this awesome list of alternatives to Google Analytics. We know Google Analytics is a lot more than just tracking the number of visitors, but in this article that is the minimum requirement to qualify onto our list. It also has to be free to use, or at least have a free option.

1. Yandex Metrica

For those who are not familiar with Yandex, it’s Russia’s largest search engine. The company itself is not that different from Google. They have their own ad platform, email service, maps, and of course their own web analytics service. 

Yandex Metrica was founded in 2008, three years after Google Analytics was made available to the public. Today Yandex Metrica is the third most used traffic analysis tool with 9.5% of the traffic analysis market.

Yandex Metrica is actually a very powerful tool and even beats Google Analytics on some points. For example, they have built-in heatmaps and session recordings. On top of that, you can find most features that you can find in Google Analytics. 

The ID for your tracker is a simple incremental ID, set on a global user level. This means it’s literally impossible for anyone to see that two of your sites are connected to the same Yandex Metrica account.

Cost: Free

2. Matomo

Matomo is a powerful web analysis tool. It’s open-source and was released back in 2007. Matomo is formerly known as Piwik, and Piwik PRO, but got its new name in 2018. Matomo holds approximately 1.7% of the web analysis tool market.

One of the features that make Matomo stand out against giants like Google Analytics is the huge amount of data you can store. When Google Analytics reaches a certain point, they start to downsampling your data. If you are currently using Google Analytics you can import your old data into Matomo as well. 

When looking at the more powerful web analysis tools, Matomo is the only one you can host on your own server. That means that you have full control over your own data, which in some cases is crucial. This makes Matomo very unique. Matomo is also available as a cloud service, against a monthly fee.

Cost: Free (self-hosted), Essential from €19 / month

3. Clicky

Clicky Web Analytics, or just Clicky, is a web analysis tool founded just before Matomo in 2006. Clicky has around 0.5% of the web analytics market. With a free account, you will get the most basic features such as the number of visitors, average time spent on site, popular content, bounce rate, traffic sources, users’ country of origin, and more. With the premium account, you get a lot more features, including heatmaps, split testing, and various advanced reports. 

Cost: Free, Pro from $9.99/month

4. Statcounter

Probably one of the oldest traffic analysis tools that are still around. It was founded by an Irish guy named Aodhán Cullen when he was 16 years old back in 1999. Aodhán Cullen is still running his company. Statcounter is used by approximately 0.9% of all websites on the internet and holds 1.3% of the web analytics market. Statcounter does not offer very advanced features in comparison to Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, or Matomo. But it does offer enough functionality to track the traffic you get to your website.

Cost: Free up to 99.000 views, from $9/month

5. Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics is an open-source web analysis tool built on PHP and MySQL and was founded in 2006. Since the software is open-source, it’s also completely free to use. Open Web Analytics is used by less than 0.1% of all websites and holds a market share of around 0.1%.

Open Web Analytics offers more advanced features than, for example, StatCounter. But unlike Matomo, they don’t offer any cloud or hosted services. To use Open Web Analytics, you have to set up your own hosting and configure the software yourself, which definitely can be seen as a drawback.

Cost: Free (self-hosted)

Conclusion

These five web analysis software are all good alternatives to Google Analytics if you have the need to use more than one, are building a PBN, or don’t want to share your data with Google. If you don’t want to share your data with anyone except whoever you chose, the self-hosted web analysis solutions mentioned above are definitely the way to go.

That being said, Google Analytics is the king of web analysis. It’s built on Urchin, which they acquired in 2005 and made public under the new brand Google Analytics. To date, 65.3% of all websites in the world are using some sort of web analysis software, where 55.6% are using Google Analytics. In terms of market shares, they hold 85.2% of the web analysis tool market. Compared to Yandex Metrica that comes in second place with 9.5%, we don’t see Google Analytics stepping down as the winner for a long, long time. 

Bear in mind that the market share data is based on what web analysis tools a website uses, and one website can use one, two, or more tools at the same time. This would give each tool a share. 

Also, although a lot of these tools are really powerful on their own, there’s usually a tool out there that can do very niched things a lot better, and don’t forget to include rank tracking in your web analysis!