Matomo

Of the open-source tools we review, Matomo (called Piwik until 2018) comes closest to Google Analytics. Besides visitors, pages and sources, it tracks events, goals, ecommerce orders, site search, downloads, outlinks, media plays and content interactions, and keeps a log of every visit with a profile per visitor. Segments work on every report, and the Transitions and Overlay reports show where people go from any page. Recent versions add reports on visits from AI chatbots.

The cloud plan also includes funnels, user flows, custom reports, form analytics, cohorts, A/B testing, heatmaps and session recordings, multi-channel attribution, a tag manager and an importer for Google Analytics data. Heatmaps and recordings come with monthly quotas: 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 recordings on the 50,000-hit plan, rising to 50,000 and 5,000 on the largest ones.

Matomo comes in two forms. Matomo Cloud is hosted in Frankfurt by InnoCraft, the New Zealand company behind the project. The On-Premise edition is free software under the GPL v3 or later, which you install on your own server, with the premium features sold as plugins.

Matomo suits organisations that want the depth of Google Analytics without sending data to Google: public bodies, universities, health and finance sites, larger shops and agencies. It also suits anyone who must keep data on their own servers, or who wants heatmaps, recordings and A/B tests in the same tool as their traffic.

It is a heavy tool for a small site. If you want one page you can read in a minute, or no cookies without touching any settings, a simpler tool will serve you better. Self-hosting is free, but someone has to run the server, update Matomo and keep the report processing going.

On Matomo Cloud you start a 21-day trial without a card, add your site and pick one of four routes: a ready-made integration for WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, Drupal and others; Matomo Tag Manager, which gets a container for every new site; the JavaScript tracking code; or SDKs for mobile apps. Matomo puts a beginner's setup at 5 to 15 minutes. Google Tag Manager works through a template for Matomo Cloud or a Custom HTML tag, and server logs can be imported with a Python script.

Self-hosting takes longer. You need a PHP server with MySQL or MariaDB: Matomo recommends 2 CPUs and 2 GB of memory up to 100,000 pageviews a month, and a separate database server above 1 million. Matomo for WordPress is the shortcut, storing data in your WordPress database, though Matomo does not recommend it for busy sites. Matomo 6, in beta since September 2026, will need PHP 8.1 and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6, and builds in the spam and bot filtering that used to be a separate plugin.

The Google Analytics importer is installed by default on the cloud and free to add on your own server. It reads GA4 properties, and each one becomes a new website in Matomo: it cannot be merged into a site you already track. Matomo says an import takes several days because of Google's API limits, and only aggregated reports come across, so the visits log, segments and custom reports do not work on imported data.

Your own visit shows in the real-time report within seconds. Standard reports default to yesterday, so the first full day of figures appears the next morning.

The default dashboard is made of widgets you can add, move and remove, and an all-websites view sums every site. From there, the menu leads to dozens of reports on visitors, behaviour, acquisition, ecommerce and goals. Every report can be segmented: the Business cloud plan allows 100 segments, 150 goals and 100 custom reports. Row evolution charts any line over time, and annotations mark events such as a launch.

Funnels show where people drop out between steps, user flows show the paths they take, and form analytics shows which fields they hesitate over. Cohorts follow groups of visitors over time.

The real-time visits report and the visitor map refresh every 5 seconds, with each visitor's pages, source, country and goals. Standard reports lag more: on Matomo Cloud, today's reports update every 6 hours, and completed days start processing 1 to 2 hours after the day ends. Self-hosted, reports are processed every 15 minutes by default.

Reports export to CSV, TSV, XML, JSON, HTML and RSS, and the API returns the same formats. Scheduled reports go out daily, weekly or monthly, as HTML, PDF or CSV, by email or to Slack. Custom alerts warn you when a figure moves. A Looker Studio connector is free, and a data warehouse connector costs 10% extra on the cloud. An AI chat called Ask Matomo is due in the second half of October 2026.

Out of the box, Matomo sets first-party cookies: _pk_id holds a visitor ID for 13 months, _pk_ses lasts 30 minutes and _pk_ref keeps the referrer for 6 months. It also stores a log of each visit. That usually means a consent banner in the EU. You can switch cookies off for one site in the tracking code, or for all of them with the "Force tracking without cookies" setting. Matomo warns that a banner may still be needed where the law asks for consent anyway, and its consent functions work with Cookiebot, CookieYes, Complianz and other banners.

IP addresses are masked by default (the last 2 bytes), and you can mask more. Raw visit data can be deleted after a period you choose.

Matomo Cloud stores data in Frankfurt, Germany, on Amazon Web Services, with backups in Dublin. Its pricing page says Matomo is ISO 27001 certified. The cloud keeps raw data for 24 months, reports forever, and heatmaps and recordings for 3 months. Self-hosted, every byte stays on your server for as long as you want.

The cloud counts hits, not pageviews: a hit is any tracked pageview, event, download, outlink, site search or content interaction, and on the cloud each request from an AI assistant counts too. Matomo reckons on 10 to 20% more hits than pageviews. Prices exclude tax, and yearly billing gives two months free.

A small blog with 20,000 pageviews a month fits the 50,000-hit Business plan, at $26 a month or $260 a year (€22 a month in the euro zone). Self-hosting would cost nothing but a small server and your time.

A growing shop with 150,000 pageviews and its ecommerce events, around 250,000 hits, needs the 300,000-hit plan: $85 a month or $850 a year, with 5,000 heatmap pageviews and 500 recordings a month.

An agency with 40 sites outgrows Business, which covers 30 sites and 30 users, so it needs Enterprise, priced on request. Self-hosting is the other route: unlimited sites, and the Team bundle of premium plugins at €275 a month, or €230 a month billed yearly, for up to 4 users.

Go over your hits and Matomo charges overage, which its pricing page works out at about 10% of the plan price for each extra 10% of hits, and it suggests an upgrade when that costs less. Matomo publishes prices up to 5 million hits and quotes anything larger. Our pricing comparison shows how this stacks up.

WireBoard (made by us) fits if what you want most is live traffic and dashboards you arrange yourself: its widgets update within seconds, a free plan covers 50,000 pageviews a month on 2 sites, and $9 a month buys 100,000 pageviews on 50 sites. It sets cookies by default, with an optional cookieless mode.

Umami is open source and cookieless, with a free cloud plan that includes funnels and retention, and free self-hosting with heatmaps and replays.

Plausible is simpler: one page of essentials, no cookies, EU hosting and open source, from $9 a month.

Google Analytics is free and goes as deep, but keeps your data on Google's servers and takes a day or two to process it.

Our open-source shortlist has more tools you can host yourself.

Matomo's breadth has a cost. There are dozens of reports and settings, and a newcomer needs time to find their way. The interface got a new theme and a dark mode in May 2026, but many reports are still dense tables.

The cloud is not cheap: $26 a month for 50,000 hits, where Plausible charges $9 for 10,000 pageviews and Umami's cloud has a free plan. Hits include events, so a busy setup costs more than its pageviews suggest. Self-hosting is free but means running and updating a server, and the premium plugins cost extra.

Privacy depends on your settings: cookies stay on until you turn them off. Imported Google Analytics data lands in a separate site, with aggregated reports only. And on the cloud, today's reports trail by up to 6 hours, so outside the real-time view you are looking at older numbers.