Web analytics services are a great ally of the webmaster to understand his audience, his customer or his reader.
But also, web analytics can become systems of exploitation of user data without giving importance to their privacy.
In practice it is good to find a balance between collecting and respecting the user’s information in order to have only what is necessary without invading his privacy.
Plausible
Plausible is an excellent statistics system that combines tools to collect the most useful web metrics, but always taking into account privacy.
Modern, does not use cookies, no need to add the GDPR notice, open source and transparent development are some of its features.
It is possible to use Plausible as a full managed service at a fair price per month or install and maintain it on your own server at no cost thanks to its free software nature.
Website: plausible.io
Matomo
Matomo is a mature web analytics system with a lot of tools and options for data analysis but also privacy management.
Dynamic, very complete, extensible and with a great community behind it.
You have the option to use Matomo as a fully managed service for a monthly fee, install and manage it yourself, at no cost, in your server or if you use WordPress, install their plugin.
Website: matomo.org
This is currently the service I use here.
google analytics
google analytics is one of the oldest tools in the industry, with many options to exploit to the maximum the user’s information with almost no consideration to their privacy.
It is a dynamic and modern tool but closed source, heavy and very intrusive for both the visitor and the webmaster or blogger.
With this tool it is mandatory to request acceptance of cookie usage and data transmission to the United States from users under GDPR and was recently declared an illegal tool in Europe, same as google fonts.
Given its closed source nature, the only way to use it is by using a google account and subjecting yourself to all its usage and privacy policies.
Cloudflare Insights
Cloudflare Insights is a relatively new tool, with many of the basic tools for web analytics with little focus on privacy.
It is a simple, dynamic tool and given its nature of analysis via DNS requests, it does not rely on Javascript and can yield metrics not present in other systems.
With this tool is forced to use the services of Cloudfare, a company known for poor respect for privacy. It has a free version with limited functionality.
Cover illustration: storyset.
