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Best Alternatives to Splitbee in 2024
comparisonApril 7, 2024 • GustavSplitbee was a popular and well liked web analytics solution, especially among the startup and indie hackers community. It was acquired by Vercel in 2022 and has since then been transformed into Vercel Analytics, powering analytics for Vercel customers. It is currently available on all plans including the free hobby plan. For a while after the acquisition, it was possible to sign-up and continue to use Splitbee separately, however, development eventually halted, and registrations closed down. In this article we explore viable alternatives.
Requirements
Before diving into alternatives, it makes sense to pause and consider what actually constitutes good web analytics?
The answer will clearly vary from person to person so for the sake of this article we will use to the following checklist to help compare apples to apples:
📈 Utility: Can insights beyond the bare minimum be extracted?
🤔 User experience: Is it nice to use?
🔧 Technical ease: Is it hassle-free to install and run?
💸 Affordability: Is it affordable even with many projects?
🔒 Privacy: Is visitor privacy respected?
The ideal web analytics offering answers “yes” across the board.
Alternatives
Matomo
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is a good self-hosted solution and can be deployed to any machine you control. The process is well documented but still requires some technical expertise and time investment to complete. As with all self-hosted solutions, it is worth considering the trade-off between control and time required for installation and subsequent maintenance. Once you are up and running, Matomo offers a wide range of features and while they may not be as intuitive to use as Splitbee they still offer good utility.
It is worth noting that Matomo requires you to install a relatively large script on your website in order for tracking to work. In some cases this may affect the loading time of your website.
At the time of writing, these are the recommended server specs grouped by views per month:
- <100,000 views: 2 CPUs, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD
- <1,000,000 views: 4 CPUs, 8 GB RAM, 250 GB SSD
- <10,000,000 views: 1 x app server (8 CPUs, 16 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD) and 1 x database server (8 CPUs, 16 GB RAM, 400 GB SSD)
- <100,000,000 views: 3 x app servers (16 CPUs, 16+ GB RAM, 100 GB SSD) and 1 x database server (16 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD)
- >100,000,000 views: 3 x app servers (16 CPUs, 16+ GB RAM, 100 GB SSD) and 2 x database servers (16 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) and 1 x load balancer and 1 x CDN
Google Analytics
The majority of readers will already be familiar with Google Analytics and know its benefits as well as its pitfalls. For that reason this article won’t go into details.
The release of GA4 in 2023 introduced a new design however it initially faced backlash from many users. The complexity - nesting of features, pages, configurations etc. - remains as high as ever.
Simple Analytics
There are several simple web analytics offerings out there and this category covers those. These aim to be simple to use with a heavy emphasis on being privacy friendly.
The major players in this space include:
- Plausible Analytics
- Simple Analytics
- Fathom Analytics
- Pirsch Analytics
These are all very well crafted solutions and compared to Google Analytics they are easy to use.
It is worth noting that they all more or less offer the same functionality and when compared to Splitbee they fall short in several areas. For example, many lack features like individual visitor inspection, automation, A/B testing, and most do not support funnels.
Tiny Metrics
At Tiny Metrics we build the web analytics we always wanted for ourselves. This is how we attempt to position ourselves relative to the previously mentioned solutions:
If you want to try Tiny Metrics you can get started for free here and be up and running in a matter of minutes.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are several potential alternatives in 2024 to replace Splitbee. As with all things however it comes down to your particular needs. To summarize:
- For the maximum amount of control and configurability Matomo is a good choice as you have the potential to control every single individual nut and bolt
- If you just need the basics, any one of the “Simple Analytics” offerings mentioned will do well by you.