Self-Hosted Web Analytics: Plausible vs Umami vs Matomo for Your Homelab
If you’re running any kind of self-hosted site, a blog, a Lemmy instance, a Nextcloud share page, you eventually want to know who’s showing up and what they’re looking at. The default answer most people reach for is Google Analytics, which is free, well-documented, and also means routing every visitor’s browsing behavior through Google’s ad infrastructure, adding a consent-banner requirement under GDPR/CCPA in a lot of jurisdictions, and accepting a tracking script bloated enough that privacy-focused browser extensions block it outright, quietly undercounting your own numbers. For a homelab operator who’s already self-hosting everything else, self-hosting analytics too is a natural next step. Plausible, Umami, and Matomo are the three real options, and they are not interchangeable. ...