Matomo

Analytics you own, not analytics you rent.

Google Analytics is free because your visitors' data is the product. It is sampled on large sites, it routes data through Google's infrastructure, and it brings a consent and data-transfer burden that has put it on the wrong side of regulators across Europe. Matomo is the open source alternative: a complete web analytics platform that you self-host, so every visit, click and conversion stays on infrastructure you control. No sampling, no data sharing, no third-party access. Node deploys and manages Matomo as a production service hosted in the UK, so you get full-fidelity analytics and a clean privacy position without running the platform yourself.

What Matomo is

Matomo is an open source web analytics platform that covers the same ground as Google Analytics and goes further in several areas. It reports on visits and visitors, acquisition channels, on-site behaviour, goals and conversions, ecommerce performance and campaign tracking, with the dashboards, segments and custom reports analysts expect.

The difference is ownership. With self-hosted Matomo, the raw analytics data lives in your own database on your own infrastructure. You are not querying a sampled extract of your data through a vendor's interface; you have the complete, unsampled dataset and full control over how long it is kept and who can see it.

Matomo is used by governments, universities and privacy-conscious businesses precisely because it answers the questions a data protection officer asks: where is the data, who can access it, and how do we honour a visitor's choices. Node runs it as a managed service so you get those answers without the operational overhead.

Privacy and compliance by design

Matomo's value is not only the reporting; it is that the reporting comes without the compliance baggage of surveillance analytics.

Data residency - all visitor data stays on UK or EU infrastructure you control. There is no transfer of personal data to a third country, which removes an entire category of GDPR risk.

Cookieless tracking - Matomo can measure traffic without cookies and without persistent identifiers, which for many sites means analytics can run without a consent banner under current UK guidance.

IP anonymisation and Do Not Track - IP addresses can be anonymised before storage, Do Not Track signals are respected, and visitors can be given a genuine opt-out.

Configurable retention - you decide how long raw data is kept and when it is aggregated or deleted, so data minimisation is a setting rather than a hope.

Analytics that go beyond page views

Matomo includes capabilities that Google charges for, gates behind its paid tier, or does not offer at all.

Behavioural analytics - heatmaps, session recordings and scroll maps show how visitors actually interact with a page, not just which pages they reached.

Funnels and goals - define multi-step funnels and conversion goals to see exactly where users drop out of a signup, checkout or enquiry flow.

Ecommerce reporting - product performance, sales, abandoned carts and revenue attribution for online stores, with no sampling on high-volume sites.

Custom reports and segments - build the reports your business needs and segment any metric by any dimension, querying the full dataset rather than a sampled subset.

Tag manager - Matomo includes a built-in tag manager, so marketing tags and tracking can be managed without touching site code.

How Matomo fits with the rest of your stack

Matomo is the measurement layer beneath the wider data and marketing work Node does. It gives our AI and data work clean, owned, unsampled data to build on. Its API lets n8n automation workflows act on analytics events, and it integrates with Keycloak so your team signs in to Matomo with corporate credentials and single sign-on. Because the data is yours, it can be combined with the rest of your business data rather than locked inside a vendor's platform.

Open source Google Analytics and Mixpanel alternative

Matomo is the open source alternative to Google Analytics and Mixpanel. It gives you the same product analytics, visits, acquisition, behaviour, funnels and conversion reporting, but self-hosted, so the complete unsampled dataset stays on infrastructure you control and your GDPR position is clean rather than dependent on a third party's data processing.