What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides insights into website traffic and visitor behaviour with limitations. There is also a paid version of Google Analytics known as Google Analytics 360 (or GA360) with additional features and benefits.
What is Matomo?
Matomo is the leading open-source web analytics tool designed to help organisations make more informed decisions and enhance customer experience while ensuring data ownership, compliance and privacy.
Open source
Google Analytics is a closed source proprietary product. To put it simply, the source code that Google Analytics is built on is not available to the public. This comes with many disadvantages and security concerns (in one instance, hackers were able to tap into Google Analytics to steal credit card information).
The downsides to Google Analytics being a closed source product is lack of customisation, some bugs may never be repaired and you have no control over the product.
The open-source nature of Matomo makes it one of the most secure web analytics platforms available. Through the Matomo Bug Bounty Programme, it is constantly being updated and improved by a passionate community of developers who are dedicated to fixing bugs, looking out for suspicious activity and ensuring the tool is secure and up to the highest of standards.
As is the nature of open-source, Matomo On-Premise is extremely flexible so you can design a solution that suits your specific needs. It’s also free, making it accessible for all.
Data ownership
The trade off with using a free tool like Google Analytics is that they own your data. This means that Google can use your data for their own purposes, like targeted advertising. Which is also a major threat to privacy.
The open-source nature of Matomo makes it one of the most secure web analytics platforms available. Through the Matomo Bug Bounty Programme, it is constantly being updated and improved by a passionate community of developers who are dedicated to fixing bugs, looking out for suspicious activity and ensuring the tool is secure and up to the highest of standards.
As is the nature of open-source, Matomo On-Premise is extremely flexible so you can design a solution that suits your specific needs. It’s also free, making it accessible for all.
Compliance with Global Privacy Laws
Websites using Google Analytics risk being fined for GDPR breaches. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has found that cloud services hosted in the US (like Google Analytics) are not compliant with GDPR and EU privacy laws.
The legal ramifications of these findings has meant that the use of Google Analytics is now illegal in countries like France, Denmark and Austria. Other EU member states are expected to follow with similar rulings against Google Analytics too.
While Google has made efforts to make the new Google Analytics 4 more compliant, the data is still transferred to the US. For this reason, GA4 is not compliant with GDPR (also known as DSGVO in German, and RGPD in French).
Matomo, on the other hand, can be made to comply with the strictest of privacy laws, including the GDPR, CCPA, LGPD and more. This is ensured through robust data protection measures such as:
EU hosted data
Data anonymisation
Use of first-party cookies
IP address anonymiser through data anonymisation techniques
DoNotTrack settings
Shorter expiration dates for cookies
These safeguards are why EU institutions like the European Commission, privacy activist non-profit organisation, NOYB and the French Data Protection Agency, CNIL trust Matomo on their own sites.
Furthermore, Matomo has been approved by the CNIL as one of the few web analytics tools that can be used to collect data without tracking consent.