Matomo

The very fact that analytics can be ethical was the very thing that attracted me towards Matomo. Users coming to your site and trusting you to keep the transaction between yourselves shouldn't be worried about a third party collecting more data on you. The fact that Matomo respects peoples' privacy and wilfully doesn't track someone if they don't want to be tracked, that..., that it what makes them the best.

Any data that is collected about a person's behaviour on our website never leaves our server, is not sold to a 3rd party and becomes no one else's business. This is why I personally love Matomo - to be able to host it on your own server, keep all that data from BIG BROTHER and make sure the customer is treated as a customer and not a product!

There are no dislikes and I'm not even sucking up. In the past, I've had to deal with a lot of products not working the way they were intended to work, breaking down in the middle of something, not providing accurate information. After using Matomo for over 3 years, there simply is nothing to dislike about it. Any dislike that arises would be purely because of bad hosting or bad configuration.

If you host the software it's not only free but all the data is on your server, and you don't need to worry what Company X is doing with it. Even as a hosted solution, it's a German company and the servers are in Germany, so that's good news for GDPR compliance. Offers all you need for web analytics and respects users' data protection rights.

It's not quite as smooth to set up as Google Analytics. Google does it all for you - but at a price, and that is the privacy of your website users. (My personal opinion.) The price you pay with Matomo is that you have to do the setup, and there can be a learning curve. I see that as a service I do for our customers.

Easy to use and easy to learn. Its got everything you need out of the box.

Google won't release their serch data to Matomo.

We've been using it since 2019 and it's a replacement for our Google Search Appliance (GSA).
Matomo behaved as a quality alternative for content search on our intranet and has met our expectations with an excellent cost-benefit ratio and ease of use.
We have no hesitation in recommending it to other users.

If a page had very little access, it is difficult to find its data in the reports, as it only displays the most accessed.