Hosting this is insanely expensive
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Heyas, are you guys using any extras? I checked their pricing, hosting on their cloud just costs 240 a year, but if you host it on your server with all features you want – the price is exploding O.o
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@RazielKanos yeah, looks like they target enterprise users for the selfhosted but target SMBs for the cloud hosted one.
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Matomo needs an income source so they've definitely been putting the pieces together the last year or two with "enterprise-level" add-ons for extra purchase with annual renewals. Most if not all is not generally needed, however this does put me off a bit and makes me want to look further into Umami (already packaged for Cloudron) and other ones like Plausible & Fathom.
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@d19dotca said in Hosting this is insanely expensive:
Umami
I love how simple it is to get started with Umami, it's perfect for my basic needs.
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Well, I used them back in the days, even when t´it was called piwik using WooCommerce tracking, Heatmap and Funnels – and I just saw the prices and went “W000000000000000000000000000t?”
I'll check out Umami – but they don't have heatmaps or session recording, no?
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@RazielKanos No I don't believe they do, they're more focused on general analytics (visitor counts, countries, devices, pages, referrers, etc)
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@d19dotca @RazielKanos Matomo has heatmaps and session recording but it is a paid extra plugin if you're self hosting (e.g. Cloudron). It's included in the cloud hosted version.
https://plugins.matomo.org/HeatmapSessionRecordingAs a long time self hosted Matomo user, I can report that as an open source system, it is an outstanding enterprise platform with barely any other competing options in its class. A true Google Analytics replacement option. In fact you can't even compare it directly to GA if you look at the extended plugins: it's more feature rich. Matomo's APIs are fantastic if you want to customize your tracking capabilities: you can do a lot.
But for advanced self hosted use, it's not for the light hearted. Running anything other than a standard installation with a few small to medium sites (e.g. to guess, up to 1 million monthly visits/actions across the platform) takes real effort. Optimized management, stability, and speed incurs a learning curve and significant time. You need more than basic compute resources. Updates need direct attention. And there is non-trivial cost involved if you want the advanced features. (These aren't Matomo weaknesses, just side effects of running an advanced system that collects huge amounts of data. The effort is worthwhile IMO.)
For simple self hosted out-of-the-box use with medium or small sized sites, it's quick and easy, yet still very feature rich. And you probably won't run into the management overheads I outlined above.
Re: self hosted versus cloud hosted, there are important advantages to self hosting including direct data access, complete data sovereignty (it's all yours, on your server), host in your own region, no user or website or feature limits, white labelling, complete flexibility, host the way you want (even on Windows servers) and manage your own security, and more. Perhaps these advantages might mean more to enterprise customers and agencies than smaller businesses. Oh, then there's the big one: it's free (the base system)!
I admire Matomo for servicing enterprise customers very well while still coming up with a very competitive pricing model for smaller businesses (cloud hosting) and yet still catering to the free / open source world without compromising their core system in any way. They behave exactly like an open source company should!
By the way, there's a premium bundle that includes all the advanced features and is affordable for serious smaller businesses or agencies who self host. We haven't found anything else that matches this advanced level of capability anywhere near this price range. The link isn't very obvious on the website: https://plugins.matomo.org/PremiumBundle
Matomo's inclusion in Cloudron is fantastic. Not only does the combination offer hassle=free management, but simple and free / low cost development/staging instances for testing and integration projects too: something we struggled to achieve before.
From limited previous (possibly outdated) experience, I believe Open Web Analytics is comparable to base Matomo but without the extensibility options. I believe Umami is simpler / more basic by comparison, but easy and quite beautiful, so that might suit some people well.
This is all IMHO based on my own small agency experience of course. YMMV. I don't work for Matomo, just a long time user (since Piwik days).
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@robw Definitely a powerful analytics tool, no doubt! Also been using it since the Piwik days. Unfortunately it's become increasingly slow to load the "All Websites" dashboard page, and a lot of the data isn't really used by my clients. It's still incredibly powerful though and definitely recommended analytics software especially as a Google Analytics alternative.
I've been looking at using Umami instead although there's a few things that really irritate me in Umami too (like it tracking all order-received/### pages individually and preview_id query pages, tracking google.com and google.ca as separate referrers, etc). I think Umami will be better for my clients though overall for the minimal amount of data they really care about.
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@d19dotca said in Hosting this is insanely expensive:
Umami
Yeah, I've never really used any analytics that much, but I really like Umami because it just so simple and easy, does the basics really nicely, and displays the information clearly.
