Matomo

Matomo, formerly known as Piwik, is a self-hosted, PHP and MySQL web analytics platform positioned as a free software alternative to Google Analytics. Instead of sending visitor data to a third party, Matomo installs on a server you control, so tracking data stays in a database you own. The installation process takes about five minutes and ends with a JavaScript tracking tag to paste into the sites being tracked. The project states its mission as building the leading international open source digital analytics platform that gives every user full control of their data.

Key features

• Self-hosted data ownership: visitor data is stored in your own database rather than a vendor's servers, with the Matomo Analytics API available for pulling the raw statistics.
• Plugin-based architecture: core features ship as plugins, so functionality can be added, removed, or custom-built for a specific need.
• Advanced tracking: ecommerce tracking, goal tracking, campaign tracking, custom variables, and a custom segment editor.
• Customizable dashboard: drag-and-drop widgets, real-time visits and maps, and full dashboard customization.
• Email reports: scheduled reports can be sent automatically to stakeholders without them logging in.
• Fake data generator: the VisitorGenerator plugin can populate demo data for experimentation before real traffic arrives.
• Continuous QA: thousands of unit tests plus hundreds of integration, system, JavaScript, and screenshot UI tests run in CI, with BrowserStack used to check cross-browser compatibility.

Self-hosting and deployment

Matomo requires PHP 7.2.5 or greater, MySQL 5.5 or greater (or MariaDB), and either the PDO/pdo_mysql or MySQLi PHP extension; the platform is otherwise OS and server independent. Installation is a matter of uploading Matomo to a webserver, pointing a browser at the directory, and following the setup steps. A DDEV-based local development environment is documented for contributors installing from Git. Matomo Cloud is also available as a managed alternative with a 21-day free trial for teams that don't want to run their own server, and translations are crowd-managed on Weblate.

Ideal use cases

Matomo fits organizations with privacy or data-residency requirements that rule out sending analytics data to a third-party vendor, since the platform runs entirely on infrastructure the operator controls. It is used on more than 1,400,000 websites, with a community of more than 200,000 active users, and the project runs a public bug bounty program through HackerOne for security researchers. Its stated mission is to build this as a community, giving every user full control over their own analytics data rather than handing it to a third party.

Free community support is available through the forum.matomo.org forums, while organizations that need guaranteed response times can purchase a Matomo On-Premise Support Plan. The project also maintains public changelogs for both product releases and platform-level technical changes.

Matomo is released under the GPL v3 (or later) license.