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Cookieless, Banner-Free Analytics Tools

The debate rages on what events you can track for your website or mobile app, without a cookie consent banner, while being in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. There are attributes you can certainly track without a banner (like page_view.pathname). There are attributes you can track, so long as you have a solid privacy policy, and possibly an opt-out switch. And the level of privacy can be controlled by certain combinations of attributes. For example, fingerprinting is a concern when you combine certain location and device information; but you can exclude parts of a multi-attribute equation, such that it's theoretically impossible to track data back to a user. See more details on all this here.

Try OCDevel Analytics

The plausibility of GDPR/CCPA -compliant tracking is certainly validated by the existence of companies whose entire purpose is banner-free tracking. Popular privacy-first, open source tools are Plausible, Matomo, Umami, and GoatCounter. And then there's Posthog, though you'd have to go through some hoops configuring their tracking script (they have documentation to task).

Before I discuss the competition, let's get Google Analytics (GA) out of the way. While GA is best-in-class for analytics, it's the worst-in-class for privacy, 100% necessitating a consent banner. Even their server-side tagging comes with disclaimers and "but you should"s. If you don't mind a cookie consent banner, then you should use GA - it's free, infinitely powerful, and often expected for analytics-based audits - eg if you want website ads (see Mediavine). So if you're fine with a banner, use GA. Those (like me) who want out of banners, are mom-and-pops who really only care about what's being viewed / clicked; the referring domain; basic analytics.

So. On privacy-focused analytics, I've used Plausible, Posthog, and GoatCounter. There are countless comparisons out there (eg this one) I ultimately decided to build my own tool: OCDevel Analytics (OA), primarily to save costs.

Plausible, Matomo, Umami

These tools are powerful, privacy-focused, and open-source / self-hostable. I like Plausible the most. Dirt simple, but robust enough to feel like you're not missing Google Analytics. All-in-one dashboard, so you're not hunting around (one of GA's shortcomings). I love it. I love it so much in fact, that I modeled OA after it. Though as I iterate the tool, it will deviate with time.

Why didn't I stick with Plausible? Cost. It would be $40/m for me to track my monthly ~20k events, with custom properties and funnels. It struck me that the tooling is simple enough to build it myself, and host forever on a shoestring. And it's not just that Plausible is more expensive than I can stomach. Analytics is something all my projects need, including future projects. It's foundational. So I decided to take control.

Matomo and Umami are also too expensive for my taste. Now, these tools are open source: you can host them for free on your own servers. However, their open source versions are Community Editions - pared down versions of the full product. And the CEs lack the tools I want, eg custom properties and funnels.

GoatCounter

At the other extreme is GoatCounter. Totally free (what?). But a bit too simplistic for my taste. I missed Plausible's power. Also... I'm not sure that I trust free. When the tides turn (and they will, with success), you have no idea what the price-point will become. Again, open source - I could have forked and modified. But I prefer control in my stack of choice (SST v3, AWS Serverless).

Posthog

Now, this one's tricky. Posthog pricing is amazing - pay as you go (same goal of OA), and very inexpensive. And the tool is very powerful. The only downside is that to achieve removal of a cookie consent banner, you need to futz with the settings and script a fair bit. I actually didn't know about Posthog till I was nearly done with OA - I probably would have learned the ropes otherwise. So if you want to compare against something, give Posthog a spin. I really like their business model and suite of tools.

OCDevel Analyics (OA)

More powerful than GoatCounter (but you can't beat free!), significantly cheaper than Plausible & company (but less powerful, for now). The price is $9 per million events. Plausible is around $40 per 100k events, so OA is 2.25% the cost of Plausible! Now... it is a bit rickety (it's new), and lacking certain features (though more feature-rich than Goat). But I'll get there with time.

And re: cost, OA is pay per event, not month. So you're not due for another $9 top-up until you've spent 1 million events. For this site here, that will take 4 years. $9 for 4 years.

Why/how so cheap? I'm focusing on price. So I'm spending a lot of time with AWS S3, Glue, Iceberg, Athena - to really get the price pared down. In fact, the more I dial this in (my next step is S3 Tables + Materialized Athena Views); the more I can save, and I'll pass that cost-savings on to users.

It's open source at lefnire/ocdevel, with some rough edges I'm smoothing out (see comment in Reddit thread below). If you hit any snags, don't hesitate to contact me.