Matomo review

Piwik since 2007, and still the most complete of these

Matomo has been going since 2007, when it was called Piwik, which makes it older than most of the tools it competes with. It is also the most complete: goals, funnels, ecommerce reporting, campaign tracking, custom dimensions, tag manager, A/B testing, session recordings, and heatmaps, plus individual visitor logs that GA4 removed years ago. If your objection to Google Analytics is that you want to own your data without giving up capability, Matomo is the answer.

It is maintained by InnoCraft Ltd in Wellington, New Zealand, and it comes in two forms that people constantly confuse. On-Premise is the free one: install it on your own PHP and MySQL server, unlimited hits, unlimited users, GPL-3.0. Cloud is the paid one: hosted in Frankfurt, from €29 per month, no free tier.

The teams that need GA4 depth without Google

• Organizations that need GA4-level depth without sending data to Google
• Ecommerce sites, where Matomo's revenue reporting is the best of the open-source options
• Public sector, healthcare, and EU teams with hard data residency requirements
• Anyone who wants visitor-level logs back

Free on your own server, priced from €29 in the cloud

Matomo Cloud has no free plan. There is a trial (Matomo does not publish the length in a place we could verify, so we are not quoting one) and then €29 per month at the 50,000 hits tier.

The free version is On-Premise, and it is properly free: GPL-3.0, unlimited hits, unlimited users, no feature gates on the core product. Because it is a standard PHP and MySQL application, it will install on cheap shared hosting, which makes it the easiest self-host here for non-developers. The honest caveat is what happens at scale. Matomo's database grows fast, report archiving has to be moved to a cron job once traffic is real, and if you skip that step your dashboards crawl. Some premium plugins (like heatmaps and session recording bundles) are sold separately for self-hosters, and paid support bundles start at €275 per month, though the core analytics does not require any of it.

Hits, not pageviews: the limit people misread

• The interface shows its age and its scope. Next to Plausible's single page, Matomo is a lot of menus
• Hit-based metering makes Cloud pricing hard to compare, and easy to underestimate
• Self-hosted performance is your responsibility, and it degrades noticeably if archiving is misconfigured
• Cloud entry pricing at €29 is the highest starting point of the open-source options here
• Some behaviour features are paid plugins on the self-hosted edition

Pick it when you need all of it and cannot use Google

Matomo is the one to pick when you genuinely need everything and you genuinely cannot use Google. Run On-Premise and it is free forever with more features than anything else on this list, at the cost of being a system you now administer. If you want the same philosophy with a tenth of the maintenance, Umami or Plausible will suit you better, and most small sites will never touch the features that justify Matomo's weight.