Which is your preferred analytics tool?

With more and more AdBlock users nowadays on the internet, the accuracy of Google Analytics is suffering. Also, there are privacy concerns related to it.

With this came the wave of privacy-friendly analytics like Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, etc. A lot of these options are Open Source, so you can self host them to be sure about the privacy aspects or save some money.

One of the new types of analytics is server-based analytics. Netlify Analytics is such a tool. It doesn't require you to install any scripts on your websites, which results in greater accuracy of the data they can provide.

So which one are you currently using for your projects or would love to use in the future and what's your main reason behind choosing it?

xavier

I use Plausible for a few days now. If you don't need all the power of Gads it really worth a try. It feels better than fathom for some reasons

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AJ Villalobos

I like fathom design better, but since Plausible is cheaper and also on par in features I decided to go with it right now for btfy.io.

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Nikit Singh Author

Are you self hosting Plausible or paying for it? @xavier

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Nikit Singh Author

@iamajvillalobos btfy.io looks so cool. Great work :D

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xavier

@nikitskulhari Free trial for now, I think I'll pay for it ( I self hosted fathom on an Heroku node before, not sure if it's as easy for Plausible)

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AJ Villalobos

I paid for 10k visit per month 1 year plan, not reaching the limits still haha.

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AJ Villalobos

@nikitskulhari Thanks! Plan to change the landing page soon, also will add a free tier for makers :)

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I use Google Analytics. It gives you incredible power with its toolset. It's not easy to use, but with a bit of learning, you're done.

Metabase is what I use for business intelligence and works great.

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Nikit Singh Author

Any good resource to get up and started with GA? I am using it for my new blog, but the dashboard is confusing af to be true. I might change to Netlfiy and Netlfiy Analytics later on though.

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@nikitskulhari Honestly, just exploring it enough times. I know that sounds counterproductive, but that's how I learned. Take some time to explore the UI and all the options, try to make the most from it.

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Frizky

Using google analytics but will definitely move to (self-hosted) Plausible in the near future. Google Analytics is awesome and free but the data can be overwhelming and is scattered. I would prefer to see everything I need on one page and only track what I need.

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Josef Strzibny

After initial research, I tried Fathom. It's beautifully designed and I was happy. They also added uptime monitoring. However, later I gave Plausible a go. Why? It's way cheaper for my indie hacking and they had a fully open-source version (even in Elixir which I like). I bought the yearly plan and I am still with them.

I also tried Netlify analytics since I host my static sites there. The price is steep, $10/month for every project.

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I use Simple Analytics for all my stuff. I can recommend it, very easy to use and covers 99% of most people's needs without the privacy nightmare.

But if you're looking for something else (preferably not client-side), you should also check out Cloudflare's new built-in analytics platform.

Both solutions are not as vulnerable to ad blockers. SA with their custom CNAME strategy and Cloudflare since it works before the request even gets to your server.

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I use Simple Analytics.

I used to use Google Analytics, but there's so much stuff in there that I never used so Simple Analytics was a much better option. It's fast, gives me the info I need, isn't blocked by adblockers, AND is privacy friendly.

It's also made by an awesome indie maker who is very responsive to feedback and change requests! ๐Ÿ™Œ

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Great question. Happy to lean in to the conversation. I'm the founder of Simple Analytics. There are great tools around and all have different angles. For example we care most about long term value for customers. That's why our yearly plan is a lot cheaper than our monthly plan. Yearly is priced at $108 for most customers.

We think it's super important that the data is from the customer. We have many ways to get the data out of our system into whatever tool you like. We have many customers who integrate their data in other tools via our APIs.

Bypassing AdBlock is also super easy with Simple Analytics. You just add a record to your DNS and you're done. No need to do any complicated things.

If you are looking for a well documented tool you will find our docs very useful.

If you have any questions about something that's not clear yet, please shoot!

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Tobias Lins

I'm currently building on using splitbee.io.

It's different from all other indie analytics tools because it can provide much more value by still using cookies. Think of a combination of Mixpanel & Google Analytics.

Analytics, User Journeys, Automations, Funnels and more :)

Check out the short video on our page to see how everything works.

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