I spent the last 8 months working on a web analytics app that is completely self-hosted. First it was just as a small side project - but then I more and more liked the idea and added feature after feature.
I wanted to have a web analytics tool that I could easily set up on a new project, that is easy to use, provides an appealing user-experience and combines all the features of "classic" analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics) with functionalities like Heatmaps (so I only have to use one tool). Furthermore, I wanted to have full control over all my data.
I was so pleased with how everything came out that I decided to give it a try and make it a product (321 Analytics).
So the first version of 321 Analytics is finally ready and I wanted to share it with you.
I would be very happy to hear your thoughts and appreciate any feedback or suggestions for improvement.
321 Analytics is not free. But I think a price of 50$ for the current product is not too expensive. The annual renewal is just for further updates/support after the first year - it's impossible to sustain development otherwise. But you do not have to renew the license - you can terminate the renewal at any time.
Also, I'm intrigued about the way the program must be deployed. "Upload the app files on my hosting" doesn't mean much, except if I'm a PHP user who has one of those all-PHP hosting accounts. What about the database?
But mine is much simpler and has much less features, mostly because storage is not cheap and I wanted to optimize to it.
Browser history is a must or at least some url paths to link to. Otherwise I have to keep going back to the metric menu for every action.
Each pages displays a whole lot of information. It's broken down nicely, but sometimes less information is more. Being able to focus on one type of graph/data rather then several blocks is easier.
The "plus" icon on some graphs expends and collapses (UI issue)
The UI colors seem really light. Might want to check for color contrast because I think this would fail accessibility.
Do you think the orange/yellow UI itself is too light, is it the gray/white background combination or just some of the font colors that might have not enough contrast? Thanks for your help.
I didn’t see any sort of feature comparisons available vs something like Matomo/piwik or hosted Google analytics.
One thing that has kept me from self hosting and just using Google analytics is that I feel like Google probably does a good job at filtering out bots and spam where I’d be more unsure with a less mature option. Would be interested to hear more if you have a moment, though perhaps I could run both for a month and just compare the data.
