No. 8 of 30 · Open source and self-hosted
Matomo
Eighteen years old, feature for feature a match for Google Analytics, and yours to host.
It is the only tool on this list that gives you the full enterprise feature set on your own hardware for nothing.
The verdict
Matomo is the most complete open-source analytics platform there has ever been, and on the measure of data ownership it is the only 10 on this list. Install it on your own server and the raw data never leaves your infrastructure, the software costs nothing, and the feature set runs to funnels, user flows, heatmaps, session recording, A/B testing, media analytics, roll-up reporting, custom reports, a tag manager and multi-channel attribution. One customer quoted on its own site claims to save about 150,000 a year against what they were paying before.
It has been doing this since 2007 under the name Piwik, which makes it the longest-running credible alternative to Google Analytics and, at eighteen years, considerably more established than anything in the cookieless category.
What you actually get
The cost is operational and it is the whole reason the setup score is a 4. Self-hosting Matomo means running PHP and MySQL, keeping it patched, managing archiving cron jobs that get slow as data grows, and owning the performance problem when a busy site outgrows the default configuration. That is not a criticism, it is what ownership means. Organisations that budget for it are delighted. Organisations that install it on a shared host and forget about it end up with a slow, stale dashboard and conclude that open source is not ready.
Matomo Cloud removes that work from €22 a month for 50,000 hits, which is expensive against the cookieless field but includes 30 websites, 30 team members, heatmaps at 1,500 pageviews a month and 150 session recordings. The heatmap and recording allowances are small enough to be a taster rather than a tool. Note also that Matomo meters hits rather than pageviews, and an event-heavy site counts up faster than the label suggests.
Best for
Organisations that must keep analytics data on their own infrastructure, and have somebody who will actually operate a PHP and MySQL application in production.
Getting it running
On-premise: a LAMP-style install, then archiving configuration, patching and capacity planning. Cloud: a script tag. The gap between those two experiences is the biggest on this list.
What to watch out for
Self-hosting is a real operational commitment and performance degrades if archiving is left unconfigured. Cloud pricing is high against the cookieless field. Cloud heatmap and recording allowances, 1,500 pageviews and 150 recordings a month, are small. It meters hits, not pageviews, and additional hits are €2.20 per 5,000.
Pricing and practicalities
On-premise free under GPL. Matomo Cloud from €22 a month at 50,000 hits, scaling to 10M+, with 30 sites, 30 members, 24 months of raw data retention and report data kept indefinitely. EU hosting on cloud. Annual billing takes two months off. Prices read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Small teams with no operations capacity who want the ownership story without the server, where Umami is far lighter to run or Absolutely Analytics removes the question entirely. Also not the value pick on cloud, where Pirsch Analytics costs a quarter as much.
How it compares
Against Google Analytics 4 this is the closest feature-for-feature replacement on the list, and the reason most GA4 refugees who need depth end up here. Against Piwik PRO it is the free, self-operated sibling of the same lineage.
Head to head:
The ten measures
Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.
What this rests on
Matomo's own pricing comparison page, read 2026-09-11, including cloud tiers, allowances, retention, heatmap and recording limits and overage rates; its published documentation on self-hosting requirements and archiving.
Desk research against published pricing and documentation. The operational burden judgement reflects Matomo's own documented system requirements and archiving guidance rather than a deployment I have run.
This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.