Analytics

Analytics if implemented should be actionable and in no way impact the performance of the app.

I personally deploy all web services on Cloudflare and thus use their Web Analytics.

I use Tinybird for logging events and doing analysis in real time.

I setup proper observability on all projects I work on. To both keep track of errors that happen and also to help log possible improvements for things I build using data, not just intuition.

GoatCounter, PostHog & umami seem great for self hosting analytics for cheap/free.

Plausible, Netlify, Google Analytics are popular options too.

Product Analytics from Scratch is a nice read. Databend seems great for more serious data processing needs.

Notes

• Just because you can measure quantitative things doesn't mean you can ignore qualitative things.

Links

• Fathom - Simple, trustworthy website analytics. Built with Go & Preact. (Code) (Best option for GDPR compliance)
• Matamo - Open source alternative to Google Analytics.
• LocustDB - Massively parallel, high performance analytics database that will rapidly devour all of your data.
• Grafana - Tool for beautiful monitoring and metric analytics & dashboards for Graphite, InfluxDB & Prometheus & More. (Grafana Backup Tool)
• Cube.js - Open source modular framework to build analytical web applications.
• Analytics.js - Hassle-free way to integrate analytics into any web application.
• Kedro - Python library for building robust production-ready data and analytics pipelines. (Article)
• Plausible Analytics - Simple, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. (Code) (HN) (HN 2) (Docs) (Lobsters)
• Metabase - Easy, open source way for everyone in your company to ask questions and learn from data. (Code) (Binary deployment)
• OmniSci - Interactively query, visualize, and power data science workflows over billions of records. (1.1 Billion Taxi Rides using OmniSciDB and a MacBook Pro)
• Freshlytics - Open source privacy-friendly analytics software. It aims to be reliable, friendly to use and easy to deploy.
• GoatCounter - Simple web statistics. No tracking of personal data. (Code) (HN)
• MixPanel - Analyze user behavior across your sites and apps. Then send messages and run experiments from what you learned–all in Mixpanel.
• What is your preferred web traffic analytics platform? (2020)
• blackrock - Events & Analytics.
• RudderStack - Platform for collecting, storing and routing customer event data to dozens of tools. (Code)
• OpenTelemetry API for JavaScript - Framework for collecting traces and metrics from applications.
• PostHog - Developer-friendly, open-source product analytics. (Code)
• A simple way to get more value from metrics
• We ditched Google Analytics for good (2020) (HN)
• Netlify Analytics
• Analytics - Lightweight analytics abstraction layer for tracking page views, custom events, & identifying visitors. (Docs)
• Roll Your Own Analytics
• Lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics (2020) (Lobsters)
• More alternatives to Google Analytics (2020) (Lobsters)
• Fathom Analytics: Count on it (2020)
• Time-based analytics, longitudinal clustering of usage data
• Deep Dive Into My Stats Page (2020)
• Using event naming conventions to keep analytics data clean
• Goodhart's Law and how systems are shaped by the metrics you chase (2020) (HN)
• Simple Analytics - Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics. (Telegram Widget)
• GoAccess - Visual Web Log Analyzer.
• Monitoring your own infrastructure using Grafana, InfluxDB, and CollectD (2020) (HN)
• kSense - Insanely Fast Analytics.
• Umami - Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics. (HN)
• Privacy Focused Analytics From Scratch (2020)
• Cloudflare Web Analytics (Article) (HN) (HN 2) (Review) (HN 3)
• Big tech finally challenges Fathom Analytics (2020)
• Umami - Simple, fast, website analytics alternative to Google Analytics. (Code) (HN)
• The Analytics That Matter (2020)
• The Startup Guide to Analytics
• userTrack - Self-Hosted Analytics. (HN)
• Ackee - Self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. (Web)
• Shynet - Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS.
• Frovedis - Framework of vectorized and distributed data analytics.
• AWS Web Analytics - Privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics on AWS Pinpoint.
• Microsoft Clarity - Analytics for Websites.
• Splitbee - Friendly all-in-one analytics & conversion tool.
• Real-time Security Insights: Apache Pinot at Confluera (2020)
• Ask HN: How to run analytics on data without access to the data? (2020)
• Analytics Zoo - Distributed Tensorflow, Keras and PyTorch on Apache Spark/Flink & Ray.
• How I replaced google analytics on my website (2020)
• Datadog - Cloud Monitoring as a Service. (GitHub)
• Datadog Agent
• Awesome Analytics
• Panelbear - Fast and privacy-friendly website analytics.
• Squzy - High-performance open-source monitoring, incident and alert system written in Go with Bazel.
• Webmention Analytics - Analytics dashboard for webmention.io data. (Article)
• Why Databricks Is Winning In The Data & Analytics Market (2021) (HN)
• Minimally Invasive (and More Accurate) Analytics: GoAccess and Athena/SQL (2021) (HN)
• Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast (2021) (HN)
• Counter - Simple and Free Web Analytics. (HN) (Code)
• Redata - Better monitoring for data teams. (Code)
• SaaS Metrics - Collection of articles and interactive models, to help you understand the metrics that matter to your SaaS business.
• Volument - Smarter take on website analytics. (HN)
• June - Instant analytics reports, on top of Segment.
• A list of privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternatives (2021) (HN)
• ganalytics - Tiny (312B) client-side module for tracking with Google Analytics.
• Load-testing my Web Analytics Tool
• Tech-savvy audiences block Google Analytics (2021) (HN)
• Monitor ClickHouse with Prometheus & Grafana (2021)
• Pirsch Analytics - Cookie-Free Alternative to Google Analytics.
• Dune Analytics - Free crypto analytics by and for the community. (Dune Snippets)
• Bast - Web analytics focusing on privacy and simplicity.
• Sensor Tower - Mobile App Store Marketing Intelligence.
• Analytics Next - Latest version of Segment’s JavaScript SDK - enabling you to send your data to any tool.
• Ask HN: Best alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021?
• Ask HN: Good open source alternatives to Google Analytics? (2022)
• Census - Operational Analytics. Sync data from your warehouse into all your business tools. (Article)
• Chaos Genius - ML powered analytics engine for outlier detection and root cause analysis.
• consent-manager - Drop-in consent management plugin for analytics.js.
• AppSignal - Application Monitoring for Ruby on Rails, Elixir & Node.js.
• Offen - Fair and lightweight alternative to common web analytics tools. (Code)
• Ballcone - Fast and lightweight server-side Web analytics solution. It requires no JavaScript on your website.
• Fugu - Simple and privacy-friendly product analytics. (Code)
• Product Analytics from Scratch (2022)
• In-Memory Analytics with Apache Arrow (2022) (Code)
• Objectiv - Open-source product analytics infrastructure with a generic event taxonomy. (Web) (HN)
• Snowplow - Enterprise-grade behavioral data engine (web, mobile, server-side, webhooks), running cloud-natively on AWS and GCP.
• dbt Product Analytics (HN)
• Serverless Realtime Analytics for Next.js with Vercel Edge, Upstash Kafka and Tinybird (2022)
• Minimal-Analytics - Minimal versions of popular analytics libraries. Reduce the impact of third-party scripts on your application.
• universal-analytics - Node module for Google's Universal Analytics and Measurement Protocol.
• Vercel Analytics - Privacy-friendly, real-time traffic insights.
• Counting unique visitors without using cookies, UIDs or fingerprinting (2022)
• Decile - Open-source analytics. Powered by AI. Engineered for simplicity.
• Quibbler - Interactive, reproducible and efficient data analytics.
• The more metrics you track, the less you know (2022) (HN)
• Tinybird Web Analytics Starter Kit
• The design of transparent telemetry (2023) (HN)
• Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk (2023) (HN)
• Brief Comparison of 10+ Best Google Analytics Alternatives (2023)
• Using GoatCounter for blog analytics (2023) (Lobsters)
• PoeticMetric - Privacy-focused, open source, and blazingly fast alternative to Google Analytics. (Reddit)