De-Google With the Creators of Plausible

These are notes summarizing Episode 396 of the Changelog podcast: De-Google-ing your website analytics with Marko Saric & Uku Täht.

How lightweight are Analytics? A comparison of the script loaded by each:
Google analytics JS file: 47kB
Matomo analytics JS file: 20 kB
Plausible analytics JS file: 1kB

GDPR compliance: of the above, only Plausible is cookie-free. BUT this means it cannot do the real UX analysis tasks: heat maps, session recording. Plausible also anonymizes more things: visitor ID and IP address are both anonymized.

(Plausible is too stripped down...seems like a good use case for lots of things that are developed by teams of one or two people. Any larger team would benefit from site insights from Matomo.)

Alternatives to Google products #

reCAPTCHA #

VisualCaptcha
Honeypot
hCaptcha
Akismet Wordpress plugin

Google Analytics #

Matomo
Plausible

Google fonts #

Download and self host from Google
Use web safe fonts

Youtube #

Vimeo
PeerTube

Google Maps #

OpenStreetMap
Leaflet
Mapbox

Anonymize IP addresses #

[use this code](https://support.google.com/ analytics/answer/2763052?hl=en)

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