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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ★ 39,233 · TypeScript MIT | Flagship | Active | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
| ★ 29,342 · Elixir AGPL-3.0 | Mainstream | Active | High risk Even a hosted/modified deployment can trigger source release |
| ★ 21,934 · PHP GPL-3.0 | Mainstream | Active | High risk Distributing a derived work obliges releasing its source |
| ★ 981 · JavaScript Apache-2.0 | Niche | Maintained | Low risk Embed in a proprietary product with no copyleft obligation |
The alternatives
umami
Umami is a privacy-first analytics platform. Traffic, campaigns, behavior, conversions, and revenue in one place — no cookies, no surveillance, self-hosted or in the cloud.
umami-software/umami Updated 2026-10-08 analytics
Open source, privacy-first web analytics. Lightweight, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative. Self-hosted or cloud.
plausible/analytics Updated 2026-10-08 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 2026-10-08 offen
Offen Fair Web Analytics
offen/offen Updated 2026-03-04 Editor's take
Yusuke Morinaga · last revisited · star counts quoted in the text (≈) are as of that date; the cards above are refreshed daily
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 a small slice 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 (≈38.6k★, TypeScript, MIT) is the one I would recommend first, 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 (≈28.9k★, 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 (≈21.8k★, 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 (≈980★, Apache-2.0) appears on this list but sits under the 1,000-star line where the “At a glance” table stops calling a project Niche, and its last push (compare the cards) is months 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 project with the most GitHub stars in this list → umami. 39,233★ — the most of the 4 projects here. Stars measure attention, not quality or maintenance; check the last-push date and the Editor's take before reading more into it.
- You want a copyleft project whose modifications must be shared back → analytics. AGPL-3.0 licensed — distributing a modified version (and, under AGPL, offering it over a network) obliges releasing the source, which is what some teams explicitly want.
- You want the project with the most recent push activity → matomo. Last push 2026-10-08 — the freshest activity in this list.
License & commercial-use notes
When replacing Google Analytics, 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. Always check the last-pushed date in the cards above and read the latest closed issues — those two signals are the fastest public check we know of.
How this page was compiled
- Repository facts (stars, license, language, last push) come straight from the GitHub public API and are linked on each card as the primary source.
- Editorial analysis (the intro, comparison notes and migration tips) is Claude-drafted from Google Analytics's use case and the alternatives' repository metadata — in Claude Code sessions or scheduled routines run under the operator's account. Samples are spot-checked against the upstream repositories; entries are not individually reviewed unless they carry a signature. See what Claude drafts and what the operator writes.
- Editor's take is signed by Yusuke Morinaga. It was drafted in a Claude Code session the operator ran, then read and confirmed by Yusuke Morinaga before publication, and carries the date it was last revised. It is written from each project's README, LICENSE, release history and issue tracker — not from running the project in production; where that distinction matters, the take says so.
- 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.
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