Looking to ditch those pesky cookie consent banners? Let's take a look at 5 lean and transparent analytics platforms to create a more privacy-friendly experience for your visitors.
Why Use A Privacy-Friendly Analytics Platform?
Analytics tools are essential for understanding how much traffic your Ghost site is receiving and providing insights on how visitors are experiencing your site. Most analytics platforms (such as Google Analytics) collect a ton of personal data about visitors, leaving us all wondering if and when our data will be sold or exploited. Platforms like Google Analytics can also be frustrating to use and slow down your page load speeds.
You can get all of the valuable insights you need about your visitors without your analytics platform tracking, collecting and selling their data. Even better, the 5 platforms below feature beautiful dashboards that display your analytics in clear and concise way along with features that can help you improve the experience for your visitors.
Fathom Analytics
Fathom Analytics is a lightweight analytics tool that promotes its commitment to privacy and simplicity. Fathom does not store any cookies for the visitors of your site and has a beautiful dashboard that displays all of the most important metrics and custom events.
Why Ghost users love it:
Fathom Analytics is easy to integrate with any Ghost site and is fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, PECR, and COPPA. Custom event tracking is also supported so you can track important events that happen on your site such as clicking specific buttons or submitting a contact form. Fathom also offers the option to make your dashboard public which is great if you’re running an open startup or just looking to be transparent about your analytics.
Fathom’s pricing starts at $11 per month for up to 100,000 page views per month and can be used on unlimited websites.
Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is another fully privacy-compliant analytics platform. It features a clean and powerful dashboard that clearly displays all of your essential metrics with the addition of enriched metrics for referral traffic from sources like Google (with screenshots of referring websites) and Twitter (with embedded previews of referring tweets).
Why Ghost users love it:
Switching from Google Analytics is streamlined with Simple Analytics using their option to import all of your Google Analytics data with a few clicks. View your dashboard on the go with a fully mobile-friendly interface that’s also available in light and dark modes. In addition, you can set up automated email reports sent to you on a weekly or monthly basis.
Simple Analytics pricing starts at $9 per month for up to 100,000 page views per month and can be used with up to 10 websites.
Plausible Analytics
Plausible is a fully open-source analytics platform built for ethically and privacy-conscious site owners. With unique features such as Slack notifications for traffic spikes, organic search query reports and a powerful API, makes Plausible a great choice for basic to advanced use cases.
Why Ghost users love it:
Like Ghost itself, Plausible Analytics is completely open source with all of its code available on GitHub and can even be self-hosted on your own server. There is also a public roadmap driven by the features suggested by the community members.
Plausible Analytics pricing starts at $9 per month for up to 10,000 page views per month and can be used with up to 50 websites.
Splitbee
Splitbee is an analytics & conversion platform that helps you track visitors and optimize your site with a powerful set of tools and automation features. Not to mention it has a beautiful interface, cookie-free tracking code option for privacy and a very active development team that delivers new features and improvements regularly.
Why Ghost users love it:
The ability to create powerful automations such as saving email signups to Notion or run A/B testing by splitting traffic between multiple pages is especially useful to help extend the built-in functionality of Ghost.
Splitbee is free for up to 2,500 page views and events per month while pricing for a pro plan starts at $11 per month for 25,000 page views and events per month.
Pirsch Analytics
Pirsch is another simple, cookie-free, and open-source web analytics solution that easily integrates into Ghost. It’s extremely lightweight at just under 2kb, which will have minimal effects on your site’s load time.
Why Ghost users love it:
Pirsch Analytics has a unique feature that lets you embed your analytics dashboard anywhere, including a page within your Ghost site! This makes it super convenient to check up on your analytics without leaving your website.
Pirsch Analytics pricing starts at $5 per month for up to 10,000 page views per month and can be used on unlimited websites.
Head-to-Head Comparison
| Fathom | Simple Analytics | Plausible | Splitbee | Pirsch | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Privacy Compliant | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Open Source | ➖ | ➖ | ✔️ | ➖ | ✔️ |
| Event Tracking | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Data Export Option | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ➖ | ✔️ |
| Data Retention | Forever | Forever | Forever | 2 years | Forever |
| Free Plan | ➖ | ➖ | ➖ | ✔️ | ➖ |
| Free Trial | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ➖ | ✔️ |
| Pricing | $11/mo. | $9/mo. | $9/mo. | $11/mo. | $5/mo. |
- Pricing is shown when billed yearly.
How have you setup privacy-friendly analytics for your Ghost blog? Did we miss a platform that you’d like to see? Tweet us @layeredcraft!
Eric Alli @ericalli
Eric is the founder of LayeredCraft. He has worked as a designer and engineer for 15+ years and loves creating innovative and effective themes for all industries.
