At a glance — how these 4 alternatives compare
Our read on each project's adoption, maintenance activity and commercial-use risk, derived from GitHub signals and SPDX license terms rather than star count alone. Sorted by stars. How we score.
| Project | Adoption | Maintenance | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 37,381 · TypeScript | Flagship | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 27,384 · Elixir | Mainstream | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 21,645 · PHP | Mainstream | Active | High risk Distributing a derived work obliges releasing its source |
| ★ 976 · JavaScript | Niche | Maintained | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
The alternatives
umami
Umami is a modern, privacy-focused analytics platform. An open-source alternative to Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Amplitude.
umami-software/umami Updated 2026-06-27 analytics
Open source, privacy-first web analytics. Lightweight, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative. Self-hosted or cloud.
plausible/analytics Updated 2026-06-26 matomo
Empowering People Ethically 🚀 — Matomo is hiring! Join us → https://matomo.org/jobs Matomo is the leading open-source alternative to Google Analytics, giving you complete control and built-in privacy. Easily collect, visualise, and analyse data from websites & apps. Star us on GitHub ⭐️ – Pull Requests welcome!
matomo-org/matomo Updated 2026-06-28 offen
Offen Fair Web Analytics
offen/offen Updated 2026-03-04 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited
Three of these are "GA but lighter". Only one is actually trying to be GA.
There is a question you have to answer before you look at any of these projects: were you actually using GA4, or were you using maybe 5% of it and ignoring the rest? Most teams are in the second camp — they look at pageviews, top pages, and referrers, and the funnels and audience-builder and BigQuery export sit untouched. If that is you, three of the projects below are a strict upgrade in simplicity. If you genuinely lived in GA’s deep reporting, only one of them is a real swap, and it comes with GA-sized operational weight.
Umami — the “I just want the numbers” pick
Umami (36.7k stars, TypeScript, MIT) is the one I recommend most often, precisely because it does less. Pageviews, referrers, top pages, simple custom events — cookie-free, privacy-friendly, and light enough to run alongside an app on the same small box. MIT licensed, the most permissive option here. For a blog, a marketing site, or a SaaS dashboard where you check traffic weekly, Umami covers the part of GA you were actually using and nothing you weren’t. The honest limit is the flip side of its virtue: if you need funnels or cohort retention, it does not have them.
Plausible — the same idea, with an AGPL wrinkle to understand
Plausible (26.1k stars, Elixir, AGPL-3.0) competes with Umami on the same “lightweight, privacy-first” turf, and which you prefer is largely taste in the dashboard. The one thing to actually understand is the AGPL-3.0 license combined with how Plausible is run: self-hosting the community edition for your own sites is fine and AGPL never triggers. The license exists to stop someone re-selling Plausible as a competing hosted analytics service. So for the “analytics for my own properties” use case — which is everyone reading this — the license is a non-issue, despite AGPL’s scary reputation.
Matomo — the only real GA4 replacement, with real GA4 weight
If you were a power user, Matomo (21.5k stars, PHP, GPL-3.0) is the one that actually tries to be GA: funnels, goal flows, cohort and retention reports, heatmaps and session recording (as plugins), e-commerce tracking, multi-site roll-ups. It is the most feature-complete by a wide margin. It is also, not coincidentally, the heaviest to run — a PHP + MySQL application that needs real database tuning once your event volume climbs, plus a cron-based archiving process that will surprise you if you ignore it. GPL-3.0 is fine for self-hosting. Choose Matomo when you genuinely need GA’s depth and accept GA’s operational reality as the price.
Offen — note this one is below our usual bar
Offen (976 stars, Apache-2.0) appears on this list but sits under the 1,000-star line we normally use to call a project production-ready, and its last commit (2026-03-04) is older than the others here. Its angle — “fair web analytics” where end users can see and delete their own data — is a genuinely interesting privacy stance, but for a team picking a tool to depend on, I would treat it as one to watch rather than one to deploy, and pick from the three above.
The GA capability you cannot replace
None of these replace the GA4 ↔ Google Ads integration. If remarketing audiences and conversion import into Google Ads are central to how you spend your ad budget, no open-source analytics tool fills that hole — that link is the product Google is actually selling. Self-hosted analytics gives you ownership and privacy; it does not give you back the Ads pipe.
Comparison notes
Pick by how much of GA you actually use. For straightforward page views, referrers, and events, Umami (MIT) and Plausible Analytics (AGPL when self-hosted) are the lightest replacements. If you need the full GA4 feature breadth, Matomo comes closest, adding funnel analysis, heatmaps, and A/B testing plugins, available free self-hosted or as a paid managed service. The line none of them cross is the Google ecosystem: GA4's attribution modeling, its audience segments for Google Ads, and the BigQuery export for raw events have no open-source equivalent. If Google Ads remarketing is central to what you do, no alternative replaces the GA4-to-Ads integration.
Migration tips
- Export GA4 historical data via the Data API or BigQuery linked export before migrating — OSS analytics tools cannot import GA4 history
- Add the new analytics script tag to your site alongside GA4 to collect parallel data during transition — run both for 2-4 weeks
- Recreate custom events in your OSS tool — GA4 events do not auto-migrate; audit your event plan first
- Update Google Tag Manager configurations if you use GTM to deploy analytics tags
- Inform stakeholders that historical data comparison will be unavailable after the cutover date
Which alternative should you pick?
Replacing Google Analytics isn't a single call — it's a trade between license terms, team size, and how much early-stage roughness you can absorb. The 4 projects above split along those lines:
- You want the most active community and the lowest risk of abandonment → umami. 37,381★ — the largest user base in this list, which usually means more StackOverflow answers, more plugins, and more deployment runbooks online.
- You want a strong-copyleft project that resists vendor capture → analytics. AGPL-3.0 licensed — downstream forks must stay open, which is what some teams explicitly want.
- You need a project that has shipped a release in the last few weeks → matomo. Last commit 2026-06-28 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
With a Google Analytics replacement the license usually decides more than the feature list — whether you can modify it, ship it inside a product, or host it as a service. The 4 projects here fall into:
- Permissive (umami, offen) — MIT / Apache / BSD / ISC — modify and embed inside a commercial product with no copyleft obligation. The safest bucket for shipping in a proprietary codebase.
- Strong copyleft (matomo) — GPL / EPL — distributing a derived work obliges you to release its source under the same terms. Fine for internal use; plan carefully before proprietary distribution.
- Network copyleft (analytics) — AGPL / SSPL — the copyleft trigger extends to offering the software over a network, so a hosted deployment of a modified version can oblige you to publish your changes. Read the exact terms before building a paid hosted product on these.
License fields come from the GitHub API's SPDX classification and can lag a relicense. The repository linked on each card is authoritative — confirm its LICENSE file before any license-sensitive deployment.
Maintenance health of these 4 projects
Of the 4 projects listed, 4 shipped at least one commit in the last 12 months. See how we rank for the full criteria and our self-hosting cost reality check, which apply across every comparison on this site.
Frequently asked questions
How do these 4 alternatives compare on maintenance health?
4 of 4 have shipped a commit in the last 12 months. At least one project here has 5,000+ GitHub stars, which usually correlates with sustained maintainership. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest 5 closed issues — those two signals together catch 80% of abandoned-project cases.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last commit) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis is drafted from Google Analytics's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata, then reviewed by hand.
- Maintenance signal: 4 of 4 projects shipped a commit in the last 12 months as of the latest rebuild (most recent activity: ).
- Last editorial review: by Yusuke Morinaga.
- Spotted an error? Email mori7ga2222@gmail.com with the page URL (subject prefix
[correction]) — we ship corrections within 14 days.