Later this year on the 1^st of July, Google will be sunsetting the well-loved Universal Analytics and replacing it with GA4. Despite providing better security, data protection and performance features when compared to its predecessor, GA4 can seem confusing and therefore unusable to many marketers. If you’re still considering your options for an alternative analytics provider, we have compiled a list of the best alternative analytic provider platforms below for you to review.

Piwik PRO Cores

Piwik PRO Core has a highly rated free version of their analytic provider platform, which in turn, has a large range of excellent features that allow for easy usability. This free version is only available to those with less than 500,000 actions each month, however, any data collected will be wiped after a fourteen-month period.

Key Features:-

• Audience, acquisition and behaviour reports,
• Funnel reports and user journey views
• Multi-channel attribution
• Cloud hosting
• Up to 500,000 actions per month
• Full access to raw data through API
• 14-month data retention
• Integration with Google Ads & Search Console

Many users have described Piwik PRO Core as being a straightforward platform to familiarize themselves with when looking to move away from the dreaded GA4 interface.

Piwik PRO Core has a very similar interface in terms of dashboards, event triggers, tag manager consent management, ad campaigns and data models to Google Universal Analytics which many users enjoyed using. As well as previous features many will remember from Universal Analytics, Piwik PRO Core provides exciting new features such as ‘Abandoned Cart’ and App tracking.

Unlike Universal Analytics, however, Piwik PRO Core is hugely GDPR compliance-driven and prides itself on its refusal to sell or reuse any data it gathers. However, Piwik PRO Core is not without its, albeit limited, restrictions. Some users have stated that the UI isn’t particularly instinctive and overall, the software struggles to integrate with other apps and tools. Few previous Piwik PRO Core users have disliked having to manage their own data, unlike Universal Analytics, which would automatically manage data for your convenience.

Therefore, we would only recommend Piwik PRO Core to businesses looking to track relatively straightforward movements on their websites, or to businesses which have previous experience in managing and tracking data.

Find out more about Piwik PRO Core.

Countly Community

Countly Community is another excellent analytic provider that allows users to review data collected from across their websites. Unlike other providers mentioned in this article, Countly Community is a much smaller provider which results in its own benefits and limitations.  Countly Community allows the user to understand behaviours and visitor journeys in an uncomplicated fashion.

Countly Community provides detailed analytic reports which explore visitor behaviour and events without providing overcomplicated pieces of data reports that some users may find confusing.

However, this oversimplification is where this particular analytic provider won’t work for all businesses. If the user finds that they require more detailed reporting after using Countly Community for a brief period, it can become highly costly to upgrade the free subscription to its ‘enterprise edition’ model.

Key Features:-

• Completely real-time data updates of dashboard.
• Detailed analytics, including views, browsers, entry and exit pages, bounces and user acquisition sources with the help of an “all-web-sites” dashboard from a bird’s view.
• Browser, device and operating system features.
• Time spent on pages.
• Heatmaps that show which parts of the screen are the most and least clicked and viewed, with a colour map.
• User flow
• A/B testing
• Well documented API

Countly Community is best suited for businesses looking to track very simple measures on their website – i.e. this platform would be perfect for businesses looking to track click-through rates on blogs or articles.

Find out more about Countly Community.

Matomo On-Premises

Matomo On-Premises has been described as the closest free analytic provider to Universal Analytics available to users as of May 2023. Matomo is available as both a cloud version (paid for) or a completely free self-hosted application.

If you opt for Matomo Premises you will need to download the software pack, install and configure it on your web server.

Although it is similar to Universal Analytics, it is also incredibly user-friendly as a result of its simplicity and is in line with better GDPR when compared to Universal Analytics.  What’s more, all data previously stored in Universal Analytics can be migrated onto Matomo On-Premises’ platform.

Key Features

Many users have praised this platform’s familiar features including but limited to;

• content tracking
• A/B testing
• tracking visitor behaviour and journeys
• event tracking
• heatmaps
• keyword and paid ads tracking
• comprehensive e-commerce insights
• media analytics and more.

Unfortunately, where other analytic provider platforms have excellent support services in place, this is where Matomo On-Premises’ cracks show.  Despite being an all-around excellent analytic provider, some users have criticized the Matomo On-Premises support team as having either slow response times or as being virtually impossible to contact.

Naturally, if/when other small bugs start appearing within the platform (such as the backend speed slowing down), it can be extremely frustrating for those users who don’t have their onsite developers and must rely on Matomo On-Premises’ support. We would recommend Matomo On-Premises to businesses which have contactable developers to hand, or to those who are web savvy themselves.

Find out more about Matomo On-Premises.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a great GA4 alternative packed with intuitive and easy-to-use UI. Mixpanel is most popular with businesses looking to track product purchases or visitor’s behaviour as Mixpanel is especially highly rated for providing fantastic product insights on websites and mobile apps.

What’s more, this free analytic provider provides the user with a wide selection of tools to understand visitor behaviour further through A/B testing, dashboard sharing as well as engagement, retention, and segmentation analysis.

Since Mixpanel is best suited for businesses selling products, this platform starts to falter when users use Mixpanel to analyse more data than it was designed to collect.

For example, when some users tried to use Mixpanel to analyse event data, the platform collected too much information – thus leading the result to be almost indecipherable.

Key Features:-

• Behaviour analysis
• Unlimited number of users and actions
• Real time analysis
• Data captured for 5 years
• User segmentation
• A/B testing
• Free plan for 100K tracked users else $25 per month

Find out more about Mixpanel.

Woopra

Woopra offers an excellent free plan which allows businesses to collect data from their websites and learn a little more about visitors’ movements on the sites.

Key Features:-

• Visitor’s journeys
• Trends
• Attributions
• Cohorts
• Retention
• Segmentation analysis.

This free version of the platform has its limitations; however, it is fantastic to gather a solid analysis of visitor behaviour and journeys on websites. Non-experienced users may have to adjust to the software, however, Woopra is excellent at automatically providing reports for the user’s convenience.

The support team behind Woopra have been highly praised for their attentiveness when configuring the software to best suit the client, however, these fantastic benefits are somewhat limited with the free version. Although Woopra is mainly faultless as far as analytic providers go, the limitations lay in the free version of the platform to incentive businesses into buying the next plan up, which is somewhat costly at $999 per month.

Find out more about Woopra.