Alternatives to Matomo - Detailed comparison with Publytics (2023)

Matomo, previously recognized as Piwik, was established in 2007 and has consistently held the position as the most prominent open-source alternative to Google Analytics. Recent usage statistics show that it is active on 1.9% of the total website in the world: Matomo has achieved remarkable success as a commendable open-source web analytics project.

It has a self-hosted version and a cloud version, depending on the needs of the webmaster that decides to use it. 

General concepts

The self-hosted version is completely free, but some additional features have a yearly cost and you still have to pay for the server on which you install the product: the size of the database and in general the specifications of the machine on which you have to install and run their software (dashboard and data ingestion mechanism) grows dramatically over time, since Matomo tends to save a lot of data to offer a very detailed analysis of the visitors behavior on your website. Publytics embodies a privacy-centric approach to analytics. On the other hand, Matomo functions as a comprehensive tool, employing cookies and automatically collecting personal data: Matomo offers, for example, heatmaps, session recordings and user flow reports which can be extremely useful in certain situations, but tricky sometimes if you want to gather interesting information from it. In Publytics, we think that all the data must be immediately informative and at the same time rich in terms of filtering possibilities. And we believe that all the useful data can be saved without compromising at all the privacy of the visitors. The concept is that we want to avoid that our customer pose themselves the question: “I have all these information, but what can I infer?”, and this can be avoided if we guide their analysis through our choice of useful metrics and reports.

Self-hosted limitations and machine specifications

Specifically, Matomo self-hosted best practices suggest that the weight of the database for 5 MLN of pageviews is approximately 1 GB. Publytics stores 5 MLN of pageviews in nearly 5% of that space. Both Publytics and Matomo never use data sampling, so we offer precise data without approximating them to speed up the calculation. However, Publytics has a technology to aggregate data so that the calculi on the dashboards of highly visited websites can be immediate, even for reports containing multiple filters and multiple additional dimensions. This doesn’t always happen on Matomo self-hosted version, which requires (as the Cloud prices suggest) a very good dedicated server in order to run fast analysis and navigate easily the dashboard.

Pricing comparison between Matomo Cloud and Publytics

On the other hand, if you decide to go for the Cloud hosting, this is a table that compares the monthly pricing of Matomo to Publytics (updated 25 May 2023), approximating their traffic tiers to ours:

The price of Publytics scales with a larger exponential decay with respect to the increase of number of pageviews/events per month. On the annual subscription, Publytics and Matomo currently discount 2 months out of 12.

Data Retention

Matomo Cloud declares a 24-months raw data retention. Publytics offers a lifetime data-retention guarantee, as the self-hosted Matomo version (on which you still have to pay the storage cost, which increases year by year).

Google Analytics data continuity

Both solutions offer Google Analytics data import, to achieve historical data continuity.

General concepts

Matomo is a very powerful and complex dashboard that often tracks more than an average (even very big) publisher needs in order to understand the audience behavior on the website: on the dashboard, there are 12 main sections on the left-side navigation menu with over 70 individual reports within them. Publytics offers a good balance between simplicity and comprehensive analytics, based on the feedback we received from all the publishers that decided to use and support our product. 

If you are or have been a Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) user, there may be a chance that you cannot get used easily to Matomo’s dashboard for the same reason for which a lot of publishers didn’t like the interface change when shifting to Google Analytics 4. With Publytics, the feeling is that you are on a very similar dashboard compared to GA3, but with a set of features that you really need as a publisher, and new additional features to speed up the analysis process.

Script weight (web vitals)

Publytics script weights less than 1 KB. This ensures that our impact on Web Vitals is less than many other competitors. For example, Matomo’s script is nearly 22.8 KB.

GDPR / CCPA compliance

To ensure Matomo's compliance with privacy regulations, and eliminate the need to request cookie or GDPR consent from your visitors, the following steps should be taken:

• Anonymize visitors' IP addresses.
• Disable cookie creation.
• Anonymize URLs containing personal identifiers.
• Anonymize tracking data, including user IDs and order IDs.
• Anonymize location data to avoid geolocating visitors using complete IP addresses.
• Anonymize all form input, including keystrokes, from users on your website.

Failing to implement the aforementioned measures would require compromising the visitor experience by requesting their consent to place cookies or collect personal data and, depending on the laws of the country, write eventually a privacy policy document (as done for Google Analytics 3/4). Publytics, in contrast, does not employ any cookies or gather personal data. Consequently, by utilizing Publytics, there is no need to obtain cookie consent or GDPR consent whatsoever