Back to Blog
Introduction
Leveraging data is the most significant advantage for online businesses to survive and scale in the digital space.
The adoption of business intelligence tools and analytics software has increased in the last decade. As a result, the market share for analytics solutions is expected to grow, reaching 18 billion by 2025. Businesses utilize data analytics to make informed decisions, improve the customer experience, mitigate risks, streamline processes, and augment security.
Google Analytics is the first name that pops into mind while thinking about analytics tools. It dominates the web analytics industry. But with growing awareness regarding data privacy concerns, businesses are considering Google Analytics alternatives.
This article tells you what's wrong with Google Analytics and why you should invest in a Google Analytics alternative. And we'll also explore the best alternatives to Google Analytics.
Why should you consider using Google Analytics alternatives?
Google Analytics is free to use but has its shortcomings. Below is the list of reasons you should consider using an alternative to Google Analytics.
Privacy Concerns
Though Google Analytics is popular for web analytics, it offers compromised user privacy. It records user information such as session statistics, website details, geo-location, and browser/device information. Google uses this data to improve its products and for ad targeting & personalization.
Google has a history of facing a series of lawsuits for breaching customers' privacy and incurred heavy fines from regulatory authorities.
Ethics Concerns
Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant. Google uses third-party cookies to track user behavior data. It uses this data to make ads that earn billions in revenue by offering free products such as Gmail, Google Search Console, Google Docs and Google Analytics, etc., in exchange for user's data.
Despite the raised concerns about how Google uses personal data, it has continued to delay dropping third-party cookies till 2023 despite constant updates.
Lack of Ease of Use
Another problem with Google Analytics is of technical skills required to use it. It is hard to use without background knowledge and training. People also look for Google Analytics alternatives because of the learning curve to understand its proper usage.
This analytics tool is also not user-friendly for reports.
The issues mentioned above with Google Analytics make way to look for alternative analytics tools.
How to choose a Google Analytics alternative?
The following are some major factors that help you choose an alternative to Google Analytics.
- Business Needs: Your business needs are the biggest determinant for an alternative analytics platform. Consider your priorities, goals, and the level of data to make this decision.
- Pricing: Even though you are not paying Google with money, you are still paying with your personal data. Plenty of the best Google Analytics alternatives are available with different pricing options that can fit your budget.
- GDPR Compliance: Businesses must comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) so that their customers know how to use their data. Thus, looking for an analytics tool with GDPR compliance is a must.
Platform Freedom:
A considerable number of web-users access the web via smartphones. Businesses should look for an analytics tool that has platform freedom. So, their analytics software can provide mobile traffic monitoring as well.
- Customization: Another factor that you should focus on is the customization feature. It allows businesses to track specific events. Moreover, you can customize what you want the analytics tool to analyze and enjoy tailor-made reports.
- Ease of Use: An easy-to-use analytics tool with proper guidance is the best option. While choosing the right tool, make sure training material is available. Also, research the existing customer experience satisfaction in understanding the tool's interface.
- Security: Choose an analytics solution that encrypts your data to mitigate security risks. So you can avoid instances of others accessing your customer data.
Best Google Analytics alternatives to look for
The best analytics tool informs you about your product performance and user behavior. You can make practical and constructive business decisions with the correct information and data.
Below are the top alternatives for Google Analytics. We have divided the alternatives into two categories: product analytics tools and web analytics tools. Let's explore them one by one.
Product analytics tools
Product analytics tools track how users interact with your product or service. They analyze the actions and events performed by the user and provide insight into trends, conversions, user needs, and retention rates.
Product analytics tools help you understand the product's performance and usage. These tools can enhance the customer experience and direct marketing practices.
Let's see the top five product analytics tools as Google Analytics alternatives.
1. Usermaven
Usermaven is a powerful yet simple analytics suite; it lets you analyze traffic metrics in real time. It gives a deeper understanding of how the users engage with your SaaS products. It offers insights on customer onboarding, product engagement, feature adoption, and retention.
Their motto clearly states their vision:
"You don't need to be a data scientist to comprehend what you're seeing."
Usermaven is privacy friendly and GDPR and CCPA complaint analytics platform. They don't sell data to anyone. Users can request to export or delete data anytime.
Like Google Analytics, Usermaven provides event tracking and goal conversion analysis with its auto-capture technology. Other Usermanven features include funnel analysis, marketing attribution, engagement metrics , feature audit report, and audience segmentation. You can enjoy team collaboration by providing analytics dashboard access.
Pricing
Usermaven has different plans to meet diverse business needs.
- For small businesses, it offers the Starter package. It provides product insights by tracking up to 1 million monthly events with six months of data history.
- For SaaS enterprises, a Premium package is available. It offers unlimited users, data history, workspaces, company analytics, privacy compliance, and more.
- You can also enjoy a custom plan specific to your needs.
2. Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics platform for mobile and web applications. It is focused on user behavior and predictive analytics across websites and applications. It can perform user segmentation, revenue & funnel analysis, and offers insights about customer retention rate.
It provides real-time analytics enabling users to evaluate your marketing efforts' impact on your sales. It encourages team collaboration and provides built-in guidance.
Pricing
You can contact sales for a quote on the following paid pricing plans.
- The Starter plan is free and allows you to track 10 million monthly events, basic analytics, and unlimited users.
- The Growth and Enterprise plan provides additional services such as custom event volume, collaboration tools, behavioral analytics, and robust data governance.
3. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is another product analytics software that works on the web, mobile, and other smart devices. It gives a deeper real-time insight into the customer's behavior by generating interactive reports.
It analyzes popular features on web apps, conversion rates, application usage, and retention rate. It allows you to build retroactive funnels that can be used to analyze why and when users drop off.
Mixpanel lets you create custom dashboards and generate automated alerts when the product metrics change with a team-sharing feature. It flags downward trends like cart abandonment spike or drop in user activation. Moreover, Mixpanel uncovers hidden trends by breaking down any event or user's property in real time.
Pricing
Mixpanel comes with three different plans.
- The Free plan includes tracking up to 100K users (unique visitors).
- You can customize their paid 'Growth plan' by choosing the features for your business needs.
- An Enterprise plan for large organizations is also available. You can customize it to include all the Free and Growth plan features.
Related: Top Mixpanel Alternatives
4. Heap
Heap is capable of powerful analytics that measure product adoption to help your products' growth.
It provides automatic data capturing to record customer interaction, page clicks, page views, etc. In addition, Heap has an advanced dashboard for constant activity tracking of different customers' behavior while interacting with the product.
Heap offers direct data access (the same recorded information usually stored in a centralized location) to all team members. In addition, the customer journey mapping by Heap provides customer engagement insights about the product.
Pricing
- The Free plan provides up to 10K monthly sessions and standard analysis for one project.
- The Growth plan provides all free plan features with additional enrichment sources and CSV exports.
- The Pro package works up to 3 projects and gives access to all add-ons with additional features.
- And the Premier package offers unlimited access to every feature and custom monthly tracked users (MTUs).
5. Woopra
Woopra is another analytics tool with behavioral triggers and automation. It provides automatic triggers in real-time based on the user's behavior. It is capable of individual-level analysis offering details about different users' activities like who is making payments, opening emails, or using the product's key features.
It is similar to Google Analytics in that a tracking code is placed on a website to gather customer information and build reports. You can view critical reports about people, customer journeys, and trends.
With Woopra's Schema, you can define which type of user data needs to be tracked. Schema can be based on both the action and visitor data.
Pricing
Woopra is available in four packages.
- The Core package is free for all, with 500k actions per month. And it contains core analytics, 30+ integrations, and even 90-day data retention.
- The Startup plan comes with 1 million monthly actions, 2-year data retention, and advanced analytics.
- The Pro package starts at $999 with 5 million actions per month, with all the free features, data loader, and automation.
- The Enterprise package provides 50 million+ actions per month and all custom features.
Website Analytics Tools
Website analytics tool measures and analyzes the traffic and usage of a website. It helps you understand how many people visited your website, which pages are accessed the most, and how much time users spend on a page. Most importantly, it lets you calculate the conversion rate of anonymous users to registered users.
Let's see the top five website analytics tools used as Google Analytics alternatives.
1.Usermaven
Usermaven is a great Google Analytics alternative for website tracking. It is lightweight, quick, and easy to install. Neither does it use any tracking cookies, nor stores personally identifiable information (PII).
Usermaven is GDPR and CCPA-compliant in the EU. It collects users' data anonymously and provides all metrics on a single page. It assists users in making informed decisions. Ad-blockers block most analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. But Usermaven gives you accurate data with white-labeled tracking pixels.
You can use Usermaven on an unlimited number of websites, as its pricing is based on the number of events. You can keep your team updated by sharing your dashboard with multiple users with different roles. It offers 100% traffic data using white-labeled tracking pixels without breaching customer privacy.
Other features include data filters for comparison, marketing & UTM tracking, and API access. Usermaven also offers weekly and monthly email reports, so you can attend important events.
Pricing
Usermaven has three different plans.
- The Starter package is for small businesses. It offers web analytics that tracks up to 1 million monthly events with six months of data history.
- The Pro package is for all kinds of online businesses. It provides web analytics starting from $14 per month, two years of data history, pixel white-labeling, privacy compliance, and three workspaces.
- The Premium package is for SaaS enterprises. It starts from $ 99 per month with unlimited users, data history, workspaces, web analytics, company analytics, privacy compliance, and more.
2. Plausible
Plausible is an open-source privacy-friendly analytics solution. It tracks events, goal conversions, and campaigns. Plausible is hosted in the EU with full compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR.
Plausible summarizes everything on one page, such as the number of users visited hourly, daily, or monthly, total page views, the visit duration, and much more. It is a lightweight tool that doesn't use cookies to track or collect personal data.
It is straightforward to integrate Plausible. You have to add one line JavaScript snippet in the "head" section of the HTML page. You can analyze marketing campaigns, integrate Plausible with Search Console and enjoy email & slack reports.
Pricing
- Plausible comes with a 30-day free unlimited trial.
- It offers traffic-based pricing starting at €9/month for tracking 10k visits.
- It goes up to €169/ month for tracking 10M page views.
- A custom plan is also available for tracking requests offering more than 10M views.
3. Piwik Pro
Another privacy-oriented alternative to Google Analytics is Piwk Pro. This tool can help track web, app, product, and user behavior. It provides privacy-friendly analytics by ensuring compliance with strict US, EU, Russian, and Chinese data protection laws.
This analytics software allows multiple site tracking. It offers customer journey optimization and user flow tracking and helps you build conversion funnels. You can enjoy customization options, drag & drop editor, and data exports. It integrates with Google Ads and Search Console. Moreover, Piwik Pro provides data retention.
https://blog.contentstudio.io/content-funnel-conversions/Pricing
Piwik Pro has two packages.
- The core plan is free forever and includes 500k monthly actions, 14-month data retention, community support, and more.
- The Enterprise plan provides up to 1 billion monthly actions, unlimited sites & apps, 25+ months of data retention, and much more.
4. Stat Counter
Stat Counter provides crucial insights for time-strapped business owners. This tool is perfect for watching their visitors' real-time live feed, detecting click fraud, and tracking paid traffic.
With an easy-to-use dashboard, users can easily track their traffic sources, visitor location & engagement. It provides information about the popular pages to optimize them.
Stat Counter can even allow its users to track visitors whenever they come or leave their site. You can store notes about visitors and add descriptive information by labeling them.
Stat Counter's instant email report feature lets users quickly get the summary stats with information on your site's performance. The reports can be generated daily, monthly, and yearly.
Pricing
Stat Counter includes a free plan as well as a paid plan for its users as follows:
- The Basic plan offers 500 page views, analytics & visitor activity, and basic email reports & support.
- The Premium plan starts at €18/month with 100k page views, 1000 monthly session recordings, paid traffic analysis, conversion tracking, API access, and Basic plan features.
5. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity provides instant site heatmaps, automatically highlighting the parts where the visitors interact the most and how far the visitors scroll a site. It also tells where the visitors are clicking the most.
With recorded sessions, the users can easily see how the visitors use the website. It gets easy to point out what to improve or remove to make the user experience much smoother. You can test out new features with Microsoft Clarity.
Microsoft Clarity makes it possible to turn problems into opportunities.
How?
It allows its users to quickly discover where the visitors get frustrated and leave the site.
With this tool, it is also possible to connect it with Google Analytics to enjoy the full power of both tools simultaneously. Apart from being a critical website analytics tool, being completely free makes it worth much more. You get to enjoy Microsoft Clarity's all features for free.
Privacy Analytics Tools
To ensure compliance with the privacy regulations, analytics tools need to save businesses by offering data and IP address anonymization, user control over data, and cookie-less tracking.
Below list includes some of the best privacy analytics tools alternatives to Google Analytics.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is one of the most popular free analytics tools, without a doubt. But its popularity is not enough to choose it as your analytics solution. For businesses concerned with privacy, it's not the best available option.
Choosing privacy-friendly analytics will cost you money. But the products discussed above, such as Usermaven, are worth the price as they meet your business requirements. You can get started with the Usermaven free plan and upgrade as your business grows with us.
Investing in an excellent analytics tool gives massive returns and maximizes your website & product performance.
FAQs
Is there a free alternative to Google Analytics?
Yes, there are free alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Usermaven, Heap, Woopra, Piwik Pro. etc.
What replaced Google Analytics?
GA4 is the next-generation analytics tool that collects website and app data. It focuses on event-based data instead of session-based data. It will take down Google Analytics in 2023. All Google Analytics accounts will stop data collection from October 1, 2023.
What are the drawbacks of a free version of Google Analytics?
Google Analytics uses cookies and JavaScript to track the audience and their behavior. Most of the users don't allow cookies and block google tracking tactics. Therefore, Google Analytics doesn't paint a complete data picture
Due to internal traffic and bot activity, the network can be overloaded. This leads to frequent changes in metrics and can confuse the user. Google Analytics is free. However, it is not a nonprofit organization. The data collected is shared with third-party advertisers and raises a privacy concern.
How To Choose a Google Analytics Alternative?
To choose a Google Analytics alternative, you must know your requirements. Ask the following questions:
- Do you want a privacy-friendly analytics tool?
- Do you need a website or product analytics tool?
- How many users do you expect to visit your website?
- What is your budget?
- Do you want a simple and easy-to-use or powerful tool with maximum functionalities?
Answering these questions will allow you to choose the analytics tool that is best for you. Moreover, look for a tool that is GDRP compliant and offers platform freedom. Customization, ease of use, security, and support are essential factors to consider when choosing an alternative.
Is Google Analytics GDPR compliant?
Google Analytics is not GDPR compliant. It uses cookies to track users' data and processes it outside the EU. You need consent from your website visitors to activate Google Analytics cookies. Also, you have to include details about personal data processing in your website's privacy policy.1.1.
