7 Best Google Analytics Alternatives (2023 Comparison)
Looking for the best alternative to Google Analytics? We’ve got you covered.
When it comes to tracking and analyzing your website performance, many website owners default to using Google Analytics – and it’s clear to see why. After all, it’s free, easy to use, and integrates seamlessly with most websites. However, it isn’t perfect.
Fortunately, there are a bunch of similar tools out there that offer even more detailed data and advanced features, and which might be a better fit for your business.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the best Google Analytics alternatives on the market to help you find one that’s right for you.
Let’s get started!
The best Google Analytics alternatives – summary
- Clicky Analytics – Best Google Analytics alternative for most users. Now includes cookieless tracking by default. Great balance of features, ease of use, and affordability. Free plan available.
- Fathom Analytics – A privacy-focused analytics tool that’s easy to use.
- Mixpanel – Best for product analytics.
- Matomo – Best Google Analytics alternative with heatmap functionality.
- Kissmetrics – Best Google Analytics alternative for SaaS and eCommerce.
- Countly – Best for mobile application analytics.
- Piwik Pro – Another solid Google Analytics alternative for privacy.
#1 – Clicky Analytics
Clicky is another great Google Analytics alternative that aims to be the number one ‘real-time analytics’ solution.
In a recent update, Clicky has begun offering cookieless tracking by default.
Clicky’s offers all the same basic analytics features as Google Analytics, including traffic sources, page clicks, etc. However, it also offers a bunch of more advanced features including heat mapping and uptime monitoring.
Where Clicky really stands out, though, is when it comes to real-time traffic monitoring. Their ‘Spy’ feature gives you a real-time overview of every single action visitors on your site take, as they take it.
In the ‘visitor log’ section of the dashboard, you can see a summary of each of the users visiting your site along with a wealth of data about them. You can see the time of visit, the country of origin, how long they spent on your site, which referring source they came from, and more.
If you navigate to the action log, you can also see the number of actions they’ve taken and even more information about the user, including their IP address and the browser/platform they’re using.
You can also see who your most active users are based on the number of actions they’ve taken. This can be useful for your sales operations as it allows you to identify who your most interested leads are and consider having one of your sales team reach out to them.
Clicky also has an excellent bot detection feature that helps you to get rid of all the referral spam so that you only see data from real humans.
Implementing Clicky is super easy – just grab the tracking code and install it on your site. If you’re using WordPress, there are plugins that can help.
Pricing:
Paid Clicky plans start at $9.99 per month. A limited free version is also available.
#2 – Fathom Analytics
Fathom is a privacy-first analytics tool that’s lightweight, fast, and super easy to use.
Unlike Google Analytics, Fathom Analytics is completely cookieless. It’s compliant with all the main international privacy laws and regulations like GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, and PECR, and it won’t sell any of your data.
One thing that makes Fathom Analytics a great choice is how fast it is. It’s a lightweight tool with an embed code that loads much faster than Google Analytics. They load their script from servers all across the world and select the one that’s closest to your visitor in order to maximize speeds.
This is especially important for SEO now in the wake of Google’s Page Experience update. If you didn’t already know, this update to Google’s ranking algorithm placed more importance on page experience metrics like page speeds. In simple terms, this means that websites that load faster now rank better.
Fathom has also designed its analytics solution to bypass ad-blockers. This means that with Fathom, unlike some other tools, you’ll be able to see data from all of your visitors – not just some of them.
Another cool thing about Fathom is that it allows you to set up different private or public dashboards for specific clients or employees. This comes in useful if you’re managing a team or if you’re a reseller working with multiple clients.
Pricing:
Plans start from $14 per month. You can get started with a 7-day free trial.
#3 – Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a dedicated product analytics solution designed to help product-based companies improve their conversions, user engagement, and customer retention.
Google Analytics might do the trick when it comes to basic website analytics, but if you’re trying to run a product-based business, you need something more advanced. That’s where Mixpanel comes in.
It offers a ton of powerful tools and an advanced event-based tracking system to help teams gather data about their users, and use that to inform their strategy.
You can use Mixpanel to run reports and find out which of your mobile or web application features are most popular and who your most prolific users are, build retroactive funnels, find out where your users are dropping off, analyze your conversion rates, and so much more.
Mixpanel can load data from your warehouse so you don’t need to install SDKs or build processes. However, if you’d prefer to, you can also stream events directly from your apps using Mixpanel SDKs or a CDP.
Mixpanel is the gold standard in product analytics and has been used by over 26,000 companies. These companies include some of the biggest names in the mobile and web app space, like Uber, DocuSign, Yelp, GoDaddy, and more.
Pricing:
You can get started with Mixpanel by signing up for their free plan. If you want to unlock more advanced features like data modeling, you can upgrade to a paid plan from $25 per month.
Custom, enterprise-level plans are also available but you’ll need to contact the Mixpanel sales team for a quote.
#4 – Matomo
Matomo is a great alternative to Google Analytics for learning more about your customer journey and taking an in-depth look at how users interact with your site.
In addition to all the usual features like traffic tracking and reporting, Matomo also offers some extensive features like:
- Heatmapping – With Matomo, you can get a real view of exactly how your site visitors interact with your site. The heat mapping software will allow you to see which areas of your pages get the most attention. This information can be used to optimize your product and landing pages for conversions.
- A/B testing – With Matomo, it’s easy to test the different elements of your site to work out what works best for conversions. You can also easily understand the results of the test by displaying the data in easy-to-use, visually interesting graphs.
- Session recordings – There isn’t a more in-depth way to track your customer journey than recording their sessions from start to end. You can see exactly what your site visitors are doing on your site, and can use this information to improve your customer journey and ensure that your site is optimized for conversions.
Other useful tools included with Matomo include Cohorts, multi-attribution, media analytics, and more.
What’s great about Matomo is that switching from Google Analytics can be easy and seamless. With the help of the Google Analytics importer plugin, you can transfer historical data from Google Analytics to Matomo to be included in future reports and tests.
Pricing:
Matomo On-Premise plan is available for free. Paid plans start from $29.
#5 – Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a product and marketing analytics tool that can provide you with an in-depth look at who your customers are and how exactly they’re interacting with your website.
According to the company themselves, “Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. Kissmetrics shows you who’s doing it.”
There is a heavy emphasis on tracking the actions of individual people and customers to create a clear picture of how customers are progressing through your sales funnel. With Kissmetrics you can accurately track drop-offs in your funnel and monitor customer behavior.
Kissmetrics offers specialized plans for both SAAS and eCommerce businesses and provides an affordable option for companies looking for “enterprise-level features at an entry-level price.”
Pricing:
Plans start from $299/month.
#6 – Countly
Countly is a real-time analytics tool with a heavy emphasis on mobile analytics.
Countly SDK can be automatically integrated into your mobile app to seamlessly track and monitor app data. The mobile integration can be used to collect data such as time spent in-app, customer location, and active users.
You can also use the user profiles function to dive into individual customer tracking. Using the profile view, you can track their actions, and view information about their past sessions and funnel completion rates.
And it’s not just mobile apps, Countly works for desktop apps too. Countly can be used to visualize your customer journeys in desktop applications and track important interactions like button clicks and more.
In addition to mobile and desktop app analytics, Countly also offers some powerful web analytics functions that rival Google Analytics. You can make use of the custom events and visitor profiles to build a detailed view of your customers and how they interact with your site.
If your business deals with multiple applications as well as a website, Countly is the perfect Google Analytics alternative. With unlimited APIs and easy to export raw, real-time data, Countly makes cross-platform data collection and analytics extremely easy.
Pricing:
Countly offers a free forever community plan. They also offer custom quotes for tailored enterprise plans.
#7 – Piwik Pro
Piwik Pro is a full-featured analytics tool that was built with privacy in mind. This tool would be a great choice for businesses dealing with sensitive customer data such as healthcare businesses or government agencies.
Piwik Pro has all the tools you need to build a powerful analytics stack. In the analytics dashboard, you can view fresh and accurate data about your website visitors. You can gain valuable insight into their behaviors and create quick and detailed reports. The flexible dashboards can also make it easy to visualize trends and changes in your traffic.
The software also includes a powerful Tag Manager for data collection and activation and a customer data platform for the safe storage of your customer data. In addition to all this, there is also a consent management tool that can help you manage all of your consent tasks such as consent form customization and distribution.
It’s the perfect tool for companies operating a website and an app, as you can use it to gather and analyze data from the web and mobile applications. It can also be used to map customer journeys between sites and apps to help you build a detailed view of your sales funnel.
Piwik Pro is designed with large-scale businesses and teams in mind, so they only offer two plans; core and enterprise. The core plan is a lightweight version of the software and is available for free. However, if you have a larger business with a need for unlimited use, then you will need to reach out for a quote on an enterprise plan.
Pricing:
The core plan is free. For the paid Enterprise plan Piwik Pro provides custom quotes.
Choosing the right Google Analytics alternative for your business
Google Analytics doesn’t have the most stellar record when it comes to privacy, and it isn’t the right choice for every business. If you want to try something new, you can’t go wrong with any of the analytics solutions on this list.
However, if you’re still not sure which one to choose, we’d recommend going with:
- Clicky Analytics for the best balance of features, affordability, and ease of use. Great for realtime tracking and they now provide cookieless tracking for easy GDPR compliance.
- Fathom Analytics if speed, ease-of-use, and privacy are all equally important to you.
If you’re interested in learning more about analytics tools, check out some of our other articles like The Best Web Analytics Tools Compared: Get Meaningful Website Insights.
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