The best Matomo alternatives & competitors, compared

Oct 04, 2024

1. PostHog

• Founded: 2020
• Similar to: Heap, Amplitude, Pendo
• Typical users: Engineers and product teams
• Typical customers: Mid-size B2Bs and startups

What is PostHog?

PostHog (that's us 👋) is an open-source platform combining web and product analytics, session replay, A/B testing, feature flags, user surveys and more into one product. This means it's not only an alternative to Matomo but also tools like Mixpanel and LaunchDarkly.

Key features

• 📊 Web analytics: Monitor your web traffic by automatically capturing and calculating metrics like visitors, pageviews, session duration, and bounce rate. See the sources, entry and exit paths, channels, and more.

• 📈 Product analytics: Custom trends, funnels, user paths, retention analysis, and segment user cohorts. Also, direct SQL querying for power users.

• 📺 Session replays: View exactly how users are using your site. Includes event timelines, console logs, network activity, and 90-day data retention.

• 🧪 A/B tests: Optimize your app and website with up to nine test variations and track impact on primary and secondary metrics. Automatically calculate test duration, sample size, and statistical significance.

• 💬 Surveys: Target surveys by event or user properties. Templates for net promoter score (NPS), product-market fit (PMF) surveys, and more.

How does PostHog compare to Matomo?

Both PostHog and Matomo are multi-product platforms. The big difference between them is that Matomo focuses on websites and content, while PostHog focuses on apps and products.

Another big difference is pricing. Matomo is only free to self-host. On top of this, features like session replays, heatmaps, and A/B testing are only available as paid add-ons in Matomo, but are free to use in PostHog.

How popular is PostHog?

According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 5,330 of the top 1 million websites deploy PostHog. This is roughly a quarter of the 20,816 who use Matomo.

Why do companies use PostHog?

According to reviews on G2, companies use PostHog because:

1. It replaces multiple tools: PostHog can replace Matomo (web and product analytics), Fullstory (session replay), and GrowthBook (feature flags and A/B testing). This simplifies workflows and ensures product data is all in one place.

2. Pricing is transparent and scalable: Reviewers appreciate how PostHog's pricing scales as they grow. There's a generous free tier they can use forever. Companies eligible for PostHog for Startups also get $50k in additional free credits.

3. They need a complete picture of users: PostHog includes every tool necessary to understand users and improve products. This means creating funnels to track conversion, watching replays to see where users get stuck, testing solutions with A/B tests, and gathering feedback with user surveys.

Bottom line

Because PostHog has a significant amount of overlap with Matomo and a generous free tier, it makes a great alternative. This is especially true for product and engineering focused teams.

2. Piwik Pro

• Founded: 2013
• Similar to: Matomo, Google Analytics
• Typical users: Marketing and analysis teams
• Typical customers: European enterprises in strict regulatory situations

What is Piwik Pro?

Piwik Pro is a suite of privacy respecting analytics tools. It spun out of Matomo in 2013.

Features include web, mobile, and product analytics as well as tag and consent management. It is targeted at users in a strict regulatory environment.

It also has integrations with a range of marketing and content management tools like Google Search Console, Google Ads, and Wordpress.

Key features

• 📈 Analytics: Create custom dashboards with trends, charts, flows, funnels, and more to analyze your analytics.

• 🏷️ Tag manager: Manage tags, pixels, and JavaScript snippets from a range of platforms.

• 🙅 Consent manager: Collect and manage consent to track and use personal information. Customize and tailor banners for different situations.

• 💽 Customer data platform: Integrate with other tools and capture data to have it all in one place. Send data from Piwik Pro to other tools.

How does Piwik Pro compare to Matomo?

Because Piwik Pro spun out of Matomo, they share a lot of similarities.

Since then, they've diverged. Piwik Pro has grown to focus more on compliance and integration with other tools. This shows in some of the features they lack. They also aren't open source.

How popular is Piwik Pro?

According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, nearly 10x times more sites deploy Matomo (20,816) than Piwik Pro (1,902).

Why do companies use Piwik Pro?

Based on reviews from G2, the following summarizes the reasons why users choose Piwik Pro:

1. GA-like: Google Analytics users find that the transition to Piwik Pro is an easy one thanks to their similar dashboards and data models.

2. Compliance: Those in strict regulatory environments appreciate how Piwik Pro provides many of the tools they need to stay compliant like tag and consent management.

3. Control: Reviewers like that they are in control of their data, tune it to their needs, and host it outside the US.

Bottom line

Because of its free tier and similar feature set, Piwik Pro is a solid alternative to Matomo. Teams in strict regulatory environments will find their tag and consent management tools particularly useful.

3. Plausible

• Founded: 2019
• Similar to: Google Analytics, Matomo
• Typical users: Small SaaS companies
• Typical customers: Privacy-focused indiehackers and founders

What is Plausible?

Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-friendly, EU-hosted Google Analytics alternative. It helps teams comply with regulations like GDPR and CCPA while still giving them the key traffic metrics they care about.

Plausible is also open source and self-hostable. This makes it a popular choice with indiehackers.

Key features

• 📈 Traffic analysis: An overview of traffic, sources, sessions, and more in a simple, easy-to-understand dashboard.

• 🇪🇺 EU hosting: Comply with regulations by storing all your data in the EU (and never having it leave).

• 🍪 Cookieless: Capture data about your traffic without needing cookies (or cookie banners).

• 🏋️ Lightweight: Plausible's script is less than 1kB, making it significantly smaller than competitors.

How does Plausible compare to Matomo?

Plausible focuses entirely on web analytics. It has a simplified, privacy-focused feature set to do this. This means it lacks many of the more advanced product analytics features Matomo offers.

How popular is Plausible?

According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 3,500 of the top 1 million websites deploy Plausible, significantly less than the 20,816 using Matomo.

Why do companies use Plausible?

According to social media, users choose Plausible for the following reasons:

1. Simplicity: Plausible's paired down feature set makes it easier for bloggers, indiehackers, and smaller teams to get an understanding of their traffic.

2. Self-hostable: Many like that Plausible is self-hostable, meaning they are fully in control of their data and costs.

3. Privacy-focused: Privacy-conscious developers like they can still track their site while remaining compliant with regulations.

Bottom line

For teams looking for simple, privacy-focused web analytics, Plausible is a great choice. Those with advanced use cases will likely find Matomo or another tool suits them better.

4. Google Analytics

• Founded: 2005
• Similar to: Matomo, Piwik Pro
• Typical users: Marketing and business teams reliant on Google's ecosystem
• Typical customers: Small businesses and massive enterprises

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics has long been the go-to choice for website and app analytics thanks to Google's huge market share, a large amount of informational content, and its connection with the rest of the Google suite.

Google Analytics recently switched fully over from session-based Universal Analytics (GA3) to event-based GA4. This also introduced conversion funnels and retention tables that product teams are fans of.

Key features

• 📊 Flexible reporting: GA has pre-built insights as well as fully customizable ones to fit your reporting requirements.

• 🤖 Predictive insights: Alert you to trends you're not aware of, like an increase in traffic to a specific landing page, or an anomalous decline in conversion from one period to another.

• 🔁 Integration with Google tools: It's easy to combine and analyze your GA4 data with tools like Looker Studio, Google Ads, BigQuery, and Firebase.

• ⌨️ Natural language search: Ask specific questions, like "MoM growth in users on iOS", rather than searching existing reports.

• 💸 Revenue metrics: Connect metrics to marketing spend and revenue conversion to get a full picture of ROI.

How does Google Analytics compare to Matomo?

Google Analytics that inspired Matomo to be what it is. Matomo has long surpassed Google Analytics in terms of features however, while keeping its focus on control and privacy.

How popular is Google Analytics?

A huge 489,524 of the top 1 million sites deploy Google Analytics according to BuiltWith as of October 2024. This dwarfs Matomo's 20,816.

Why do companies use Google Analytics?

According to G2, users choose Google Analytics for:

1. Website traffic: The main use case reviewers praise GA for simply understanding their website's traffic, where it comes from, and what they do on the site.

2. Connection to marketing: Marketers like that it connects to marketing tools like Ads and Search Console. This helps them analyze the overall effectiveness and ROI of marketing efforts.

3. AI insights: Reviewers appreciate the fact that GA surfaces insights automatically and makes predictions. This helps them find new ways of improving their site.

Bottom line

You likely wouldn't consider Matomo without thinking about Google Analytics. It still has the best connections to the other Google tools and a huge user base. If you just need web analytics, it's a good choice.

5. Heap

• Founded: 2013
• Similar to: PostHog, Amplitude
• Typical users: Product and marketing teams
• Typical customers: B2C SaaS and ecommerce companies with a user experience focus.

What is Heap?

Heap describes itself as a digital insights platform. This means it offers both product analytics and session replay and supports marketing use cases with multi-touch attribution.

Contentsquare, a marketing and ecommerce analytics firm, acquired Heap in September 2023 and is working to integrate the two products.

Key features

• ✅ Event autocapture: Product teams don't need to rely on engineers to instrument all events. Heap has a visual editor for teams to tag events directly on-page for analysis.

• 📺 Session replay: Get qualitative insights about user behavior by replaying their session - although this lacks the debugging tools typical of most replay tools.

• 🔥 Heatmaps: See where people click, what point they scroll to, and the areas that get the most attention.

• 🤖 Analysis suggestions: Advanced data science capabilities discover hidden interactions, friction points, and knowledge about key paths.

• 🔁 Managed ETL: Connect to data warehouses, so you can combine your analytics with other sources and get a fuller picture of the entire user journey.

How does Heap compare to Matomo?

Heap has much more focus on product analytics than Matomo. It lacks a simple web analytics dashboard, but does have autocapture.

How popular is Heap?

According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 2824 of the top 1 million websites deploy Heap. 20816 use Matomo.

Why do companies use Heap?

According to G2 reviews, companies enjoy these three areas of Heap:

1. Autocapture: Non-technical users love how easy autocapture makes tracking on their site. Along with the element data included, this provides a huge amount of useful analytics data with little setup.

2. Simple setup: It does not take a big technical effort to set Heap up. Users can add a single script and begin collecting data. They then make it easy to visualize that data through user paths, funnels, and session replays.

3. Streamlining analysis: By having analytics and session replay data in one place, Heap makes it easy to understand the usage of their app or site. This replaces interviews or user testing and makes the development cycle faster.

Bottom line

For product-focused teams, Heap's focus makes it a good choice. It does lack the breadth of features that Matomo offers though.

6. Amplitude

• Founded: 2012
• Similar to: PostHog, Pendo
• Typical users: Product managers, data analysts, marketing teams
• Typical customers: Mid-size and large enterprises

What is Amplitude?

Amplitude is one of the original product analytics tools. Many large enterprise customers, like Ford, NBCUniversal, and Walmart rely on it. In recent years, it also added A/B testing, session replay, and a customer data platform to its offering.

Key features

• 📈 Product analytics: Funnel and retention analysis, user paths, behavioral cohorts, custom dashboards, and more.

• 🧪 A/B testing: Test new features on specific targets and analyze with primary, secondary, and counter metrics.

• 💁‍♂️ Customer data platform: Combine analytics data with third-party tools for data governance, identity resolution, and data federation.

• 🤖 AI insight builder: Generate insights based on natural language requests, like "What is my purchase conversion rate?".

• 📹 Session replay: Reconstruct user sessions to understand how people interact with your site and app. Visualize the reality behind user journeys and metrics.

How does Amplitude compare to Matomo?

How popular is Amplitude?

Amplitude and Matomo are neck and neck in terms of popularity. According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 19,098 of the top 1 million websites deploy Amplitude and 20,816 use Matomo.

Why do companies use Amplitude?

According to G2 reviews, Amplitude users appreciate three key aspects:

1. Simple to use: Amplitude makes it easy for non-technical users to get insights about their product and make improvements. Amplitude is built for users like product managers and marketers, making it a popular choice for them.

2. Built-in A/B testing: Amplitude offers integrated experimentation features. This enables companies to run experiments on existing cohorts, and then analyze the data in a single place.

3. Become data-driven: Amplitude users appreciate it helps them become data-driven. It becomes easy to add data, visualize it, and make decisions. It makes data accessible to them.

Bottom line

Amplitude is a popular choice for product teams looking for simple product analytics. Since it offers a similarly wide range of features as Matomo, it makes for a solid choice.

7. Pendo

• Founded: 2013
• Similar to: PostHog, Amplitude
• Typical users: Product managers and customer success teams
• Typical customers: Small and mid-market B2C apps

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a product experience platform that offers session replay, user feedback, product analytics, in-app guides, and product validation tools. It's primarily used by product managers and customer success teams.

Key features

• 📊 Product analytics: Learn how users are using your app with event autocapture. Analyze with funnels, trends, and retention analysis.

• 📹 Session replay: Visualize the real behavior behind your product data.

• 📘 In-app guides: Deliver personalized guidance to customers inside your app, without changing the code.

• 📣 User feedback: A centralized location to capture product feedback. Capture manually or with in-app prompts.

• 🛣️ Product validation and roadmaps: Manage your backlog and plan your roadmap to create alignment.

How does Pendo compare to Matomo?

Pendo has a slightly different set of features than Matomo or the other tools on this list. It doesn't have the same focus on web analytics, but makes up for it with other product experience tools.

How popular is Pendo?

Matomo is significantly more popular than Pendo according to BuiltWith (as of October 2024). 20,816 of the top million websites deploy Matomo while only 3,040 use Pendo.

Why do companies use Pendo?

According to G2 reviews, customers use Pendo for:

1. Customer support and feedback: Pendo is valued for its customer support and feedback collection capabilities.

2. Improving onboarding: Pendo's in-app guides combined with analytics features facilitate experimenting with new onboarding flows and improving user adoption.

3. Product planning: Pendo's data tools, product validation, and roadmap features help align internal teams and stakeholders on product development.

Bottom line

If you're looking for product tours and surveys along with product analytics and session replay, Pendo is a good choice for you. It can be more complicated to get value out of than Matomo though.

Is PostHog right for you?

Here's the (short) sales pitch.

We're biased, obviously, but we think PostHog is the perfect Matomo replacement if:

• You want all the tools to help you build a better product (like product analytics and A/B testing).
• You value transparency. We're open source and open core.
• You want to try before you buy. We're self-serve with a generous free tier.

Check out our product pages and read our docs to learn more.