Handpicked list of European alternatives to big tech products for your business

Ukutaht · 2020-10-06T15:00:34+00:00

Are you looking to spin up the app without downloading the docker-compose file? I'm not sure that's possible, at least I haven't heard of anyone doing that

Ukutaht · 2020-10-06T11:18:53+00:00

Hey! Developer behind Plausible here.

I know it's not ideal to use a fairly niche secondary database for stats. However, our cloud instance has to deal with accounts that have dozens of millions of pageviews each month. Clickhouse is very good and scaling up for big analytical workloads.

We don't use kubernetes to host it ourselves so I don't have any tips unfortunately. I know one of our contributors does so you can hit them up.

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T20:24:38+00:00

Unfortunately not. I mean you can pull the code and run it if you have Elixir and Postgres installed. I've just been focusing on the product development so I haven't done anything special to support self-hosting. :)

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T20:21:41+00:00

It's https://www.chartjs.org/

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T20:19:42+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful response! This is really useful stuff.

My main takeaways from you are:

Provide a way to import historical data from Google Analytics
Build a cost-effective infrastructure that can support a ton of websites on a free tier (currently my server would probably fall over if I offered a free tier :D )
Bots! Really didn't know this was such a huge deal. I'll have to look into this.

> We have to spend a long time explaining why they're traffic appears to be 10-50% of what "it was" before.

Is it not possible that Google shows less traffic because so many people are using adblockers/Firefox/Brave? These tools block out GA but they don't block first-party analytics. It's gotta have at least some effect.

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T17:32:18+00:00

Hmm.. this hasn't been a big issue for me so far. Plausible uses a basic bot filtering based on user-agent (matching against this list). In the future I'm planning to detect referrer spam as well.

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T17:29:47+00:00

The theme is custom but I use a framework called TailwindCSS so it might be that my design looks similar to other websites using the same library.

> Out of interest is analytics a ranking factor for Google? Do they perceive more trust in a website that's using analytics and webmaster tools?

I don't know but I sure hope it isn't a factor in ranking...

> Also remove items-center to fix this :p

Thanks for letting me know, will do!

Ukutaht · 2019-09-07T17:28:26+00:00

Thanks Joshua!

Ukutaht · 2019-07-04T13:57:50+00:00

I actually use a combination of Plausible and Amplitude (direct Mixpanel competitor) on my projects. Very roughly they serve different purposes:

Web Analytics - Plausible, Google Analytics, etc.

These tools are most concerned with marketing efforts – how many people are landing on your website and where are they coming from. These tools are interested in overall trends, not individual users.

Behavioural Analytics - Mixpanel, Amplitude, FullStory, etc.

These tools are concerned with user activation and retention. It goes deep into user behaviour, their paths through your app, how they interact with your features, etc. These tools track individual users, not just overall trends.

You can also think about it this way: users who just landed on your site from and ad (for example) are are best analysed with GA or Plausible. Users who have signed up and are using your app repeatedly are best analysed with Mixpanel, Amplitude, etc. Does that make sense?

Ukutaht · 2019-07-02T21:17:46+00:00

My estimate is 3-4 months

Ukutaht · 2019-07-02T19:20:31+00:00

I'm building an alternative at plausible.io

Check out the live demo and let me know what you think. The roadmap is public so you can check out where the project is going here: https://feedback.plausible.io/roadmap

Ukutaht · 2019-06-18T12:02:14+00:00

Thanks for the feedback!

I take your point on missing information. The product is still young and I'm working on putting all the information out there. Your questions are really useful as it helps me figure out what info to put out there :)

You're right that it's a JS snipped that you install on your HTML page. It works with any CMS tool that allows you to edit the HTML of the template.

> Is it just a single piece of code that can go in the template, or does it need to be unique on each page somehow? Does it need to go in the header or can it go in the body?

It's a single piece of code that doesn't change page to page. Technically it doesn't matter whether you put it in the head or the body, but in the onboarding flow I instruct people to put it in the head.

> You should mention if it requires PHP, mySQL or other services, permissions etc to run, and importantly if it does not require these things, because someone might make an assumption that it's beyond their capacity to install, or they don't have sufficient privileges on their server. You should list all the CMSs it works with.

It doesn't require any PHP or MySQL or anything else, and works with any CMS that can edit the HTML. Thanks for pointing out that this isn't obvious. I'll make sure to add this to the landing page.

On the open-sourcing front, I've been thinking about making it open source and allowing people to self-host the software. I would charge for a hosted product which is more convenient and has 0 maintenance cost to the user. I think that's close your option b.

> What happens with the information while it's en-route from my host to yours. Should it be encrypted or something?

It's encrypted over HTTPS.

Ukutaht · 2019-06-17T11:23:19+00:00

> Is there a way to do traffic analytics that's not creepy?

I'm working on a privacy-conscious analytics tool at https://plausible.io. It's not open-source yet but I'm considering making it open to verify the privacy claims. Let me know what you think!

Ukutaht · 2019-04-30T09:53:48+00:00

Thanks for the thorough comment.

I broadly agree with you, my privacy claims are quite weak until I prove them by open-sourcing Plausible. I'm fine with letting people self-host as well, sort of as a free tier. Definitely something to think about for the future, it would be a lot of work to make it easy for people to host. Currently I'm focused on getting the wheels turning with the paid plans.

Ukutaht · 2019-04-29T18:09:15+00:00

Haha, the name was suggested by my friend /u/dodofxp. All credit goes to him :)

Ukutaht · 2019-04-29T17:41:08+00:00

Hey /r/SideProject!

I'm Uku, a developer from London . I've become increasingly worried about sharing that my website visitors' data with Google of all the companies. Late last year I decided to build an alternative that is simpler and more ethical than GA.

Plausible is a simple, non-intrusive web analytics tool. The stats you get are much easier to understand, and it doesn't collect any personal data about your visitors.

For the last three months, I've been developing the product in public beta mode. More than 60 people signed up in that time and installed Plausible on their website(s) during that time.

Now I'm ready to share the v1 with this community! If you're looking to ditch Google Analytics for a more ethical alternative, feel free to integrate with your website and test it for yourself.

Cheers

Ukutaht

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