How is Matomo different to Google Analytics and other web analytics tools?
Matomo (Piwik) VS Google Analytics!
Matomo is the leading open source web analytics software used on more than one million websites in 200 countries. But when there are also dozens of other free and paid web analytics solutions, why choose Matomo? One of the principle advantages of Matomo is that you are in control. Unlike remote-hosted services (such as Google Analytics, Webtrends or Adobe Analytics), you host Matomo on your own server and the data is tracked inside your Mysql database. Because Matomo is installed on your server, you enjoy full control over your data. You can access the data easily via the Matomo APIs. Advanced users can use Custom Dimensions, Segmentation, or even run manual queries on the database in order to build advanced reports. Matomo can be used to measure your websites, your mobile applications, your software applications, and can also be used on your intranet portals and intranet websites.
Additionally, Matomo provides many advantages over Google Analytics: ability to get Form Analytics, Video Analytics, Heatmaps of your pages, Session Recording, Custom Branding, 100% un-sampled reports, open source “Freedom” software, and more.
Matomo also protects your visitor privacy with advanced privacy controls. When using Matomo for Web Analytics, you ensure that your visitors behaviour on your website(s) is not shared with advertising companies or any other third party.
-> View our comparison Google Analytics VS Matomo
Matomo is an open platform which you can extend with plugins and make it your own. More than 70 plugins are available on our Marketplace (both free plugins and paid premium plugins). For even more possibilities you can even build your own plugin for Matomo or get the experts to build it for you.
Another key advantage: in Matomo there is no sampling of data. Matomo always report all of your data and will not filter out some. There is no data limit with Matomo!
To help you decide on a Web Analytics software, you might want to look at the list of features in Matomo or the online demo. Matomo offers nearly all features that other tools may offer and also has some unique features such as Real Time visitor details, Ecommerce Analytics, Visitor Profile, Real Time Visitor Maps and an awesome Mobile App for iOS and Android. Finally, our Roadmap is public, and the community can check our progress on the public issue tracker. You can even track your Android or iOS mobile apps.
You may also be interested in understanding why statistics from Matomo and my other web analytics tool (log analyzer, webalizer or javascript based like Google Analytics) are different?
If you are already using Google Analytics, you can import your historical data and reports in Matomo, see our Import Google Analytics data user guide to get started.
Happy Analytics!