Matomo

ALMOST

A weekend of work, and real gaps remain.

A full analytics suite you can host yourself: page views, goals, funnels, heatmaps and a visitor log, with the data staying on your own server. The paid tier is the hosted version.

Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

Build the tenth of Matomo you actually read.

BE HONEST FIRST
- Matomo is free to self-host. Build only if you want a fraction of it with none of the weight

STACK
- One endpoint and one dashboard beside your existing app
- Postgres or SQLite, one events table

COLLECT
- Page views with path, referrer host, coarse device bucket and language
- Custom events as a name and a JSON payload
- A visitor identity that is a salted hash rotated daily; never a raw IP or user agent

THE FOUR REPORTS THAT GET READ
- Views and visitors over time
- Top pages
- Top referrers, with search engines grouped
- Goal completions, a goal being an event name plus an optional path pattern

EVERYTHING COMPUTED LATE
- Day, week, month and year buckets from the same rows at query time
- No aggregate tables, so a correction is a query change and not a migration

Include the schema, the four queries and a README on retention.

What you lose

Reports that took fifteen years to accumulate — cohorts, funnels, site search, campaign attribution, e-commerce
A visitor log detailed enough to satisfy an audit, which most privacy-first tools deliberately do not keep
Import from other analytics products, including server log files
A plugin ecosystem, and someone maintaining the upgrade path between major versions

If you would rather not build

Google Analytics, if the privacy position is not the reason you are here

The escape hatch

open source · no votes, no paid placement

Matomo

The product itself, GPL and self-hostable.

matomo-org/matomofree · open source

Umami

A small analytics server that runs beside an existing database.

umami-software/umamifree · open source

Why this verdict

our own opinion · changed only by a person

52/100

Verdict kinda at 52: the collection is easy, the reporting surface is enormous. If you need more than four reports, self-hosting Matomo beats writing them.

History

tracked since 10 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten

Interest · last 30 dayspeak 1/day

0113 Jul18 Jul23 Jul28 Jul2 Aug7 Aug11 Aug

— views— prompt copies none yet— votes none yet

Questions about Matomo

answered from the record above

Is Matomo free?

No — the plan we track is $26 a month. Matomo Cloud from around $26/month for 50,000 hits; the on-premise version is free and is the point of the project.

Can you replace Matomo by building your own?

ALMOST. A weekend of work, and real gaps remain. Replacement score 52 out of 100, build time a weekend. Read what you lose before you decide.

How much does Matomo cost?

$26 a month on Cloud Essentials — $312 a year. Recorded 9 Aug 2026.

What do you lose by replacing Matomo?

Reports that took fifteen years to accumulate — cohorts, funnels, site search, campaign attribution, e-commerce; A visitor log detailed enough to satisfy an audit, which most privacy-first tools deliberately do not keep; Import from other analytics products, including server log files; A plugin ecosystem, and someone maintaining the upgrade path between major versions. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.

Is there an open-source alternative to Matomo?

Yes: Matomo, Umami. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.

Related entries

same category first, most replaced first

All 21 in Analytics

Coming soon

Every week, something stops being worth paying for.

New verdicts, prices that moved, entries added. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.

free forever · no tracking pixel · every prompt stays free on the site