I've used Mint and started to work on Ackee since it has been abandoned. It took me several rewrites and years, but it all started with Mint as an inspiration :D
All started with my self-hosted photo-management tool Lychee (https://lychee.electerious.com). We named it Lychee because we had some lychees on the desk while working on the first version. It was the only cool name we could come up with.
All my tools/webapps after Lychee are somehow following the same species or clade: Rosid, Malvid and now Ackee.
Ackee only tracks page views, site visits and referrers by default. It stores no IPs and it's not possible to view the browsing history of a user. The data can't be used to identify a user and should therefore be GDPR compliant.
But: I'm not a lawyer. I can't give you a legally certain statement. It's hard to say what's "identifiable data" according to the GDPR.
> There's "caring about privacy" in the subheadings, yet there's a whole section in docs about collecting private data [1]. Empty words.
The advanced tracking is turned off by default. Ackee will never store a browsing history of a user and tries it best to keep tracked data anonymised.
It's all about finding a balance between privacy and analytics. At the end it's still an analytics tool and there would be nothing to show without data.
Using "nginx/apache logs" and "what browsers send anyway" is more than Ackee tracks by default. Storing and analysing this data isn't even allowed by the GDPR without asking the user.
There's still a lot missing in Ackee, but even with all the features I'm planning to add it will never be a full replacement for Google Analytics. And I think that's the best about Ackee. Because not everyone needs full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights.
Ackee can also show page views, but it's not implemented in the UI, yet. This is the same for browser, system, visit duration and other insights (all of them are optional to track and turned off by default). Keep an eye on https://github.com/electerious/Ackee/issues/35 to know when it's ready.
Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could be a great addition :)
A side project I've been working on for a while now. Ackee is a self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy. It runs on your own server, analyses the traffic of your websites and provides useful statistics in a minimal interface. If you have any questions or feedback, just write it here :) Thanks!
Piwik/Matomo is more like Google Analytics in the way it works and what you can do with it. Ackee will never be a replacement if you need full-featured marketing analytics with tons of options and insights. Ackee tries to be less. Lightweight, easy to install and with a good balance between analytics and privacy.
What about vs. the old perl script, awstats? I'm still using that, amazingly, after like 15 years. It does the basics fairly well, if a little ugly. I'm always looking for new cool stuff though.
What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records (as an arbitrary large number)? Or a couple gigs of stats data?
We used to provide our own stats software to our customers before it became an utter nightmare of indexing databases, cron jobs, report generation, and customers stepping over their hosting quotas because of all the stats data.
> As soon as a stream row has been read by the continuous views that must read it, it is discarded. Raw, granular data is not stored anywhere. The only data that is persisted for a continuous view is whatever is returned by running a SELECT * FROM that_view. Thus you can think of a continuous view as a very high-throughput, realtime materialized view.
I can't speak to the OP's performance, but Snowplow[1] may be good for your use. It's a bit more general purpose than just pure web analytics, and doesn't come with the reporting interface. But as far as the data collection and storage at scale aspect, it's fantastic.
> What happens when you start to accumulate over 5 million+ records
I don't think Ackee is the right tool if your site as so many visitors. And to be honest: I don't know what will happen at this scale. There shouldn't be a problem as long as MongoDB can handle it.
Agree, just make sure you are running a modern version of MongoDB with WiredTiger storage engine and the server has enough memory. It should be able to handle 5 million records on modest hardware.
Looks good! We removed analytics from our sites for privacy and simplicity reasons so I’ll consider this. Does it use JavaScript clientside or hook up to express or nginx or both?
Before google analytics I remember there were a few self hosted tools in this space. Would you mind adding a list of the most current ones that people are using? I need to get caught up.
Ackee uses a JS snippet to get the data. Nginx logs won't work, but the API is fully documented and it should be possible to build an import / custom script. Could also work with express.
Ackee and Fathom are very similar. Both in the way they display data and how they process it. The biggest advantages of Ackee (compared to Fathom) are probably:
- A documented REST API that lets you build upon Ackee. Could be used for custom import scripts or apps that display your current visitor stats in the menu bar.
- Ackee allows you to track more than just page/site views (browser, system, etc.). This is optional and off by default, but great for people/companies that need more insights.
Fathom definitely has a head start, while Ackee is very young. Can't wait to see how Fathom v2 will look like and how both will compare in the future.
Malvid can display anything a browser can display. It should also work fine with React, Angular, and Vue components when you can create a preview HTML for each component (the preview HTML is required for the preview on the top right). This might be the tricky part, but you can use any tool you want to generate it.
