A free software Google Analytics alternative, formerly Piwik
Matomo is a web analytics platform written in PHP and released under the GPL v3 or later; it was called Piwik before a rename. It runs on any web server backed by MySQL or MariaDB, and the JavaScript snippet you get at the end of setup feeds visits, referrers, campaigns and e-commerce sales into real-time reports that live in your own database. The project describes itself as a free software alternative to Google Analytics and says it runs on more than 1.4 million websites. It is also sold as a cloud service and ships as a WordPress plugin, Matomo for WordPress.
The comparison of self-hosted web analytics tools weighs Matomo against the other self-hosted tools on required database, licence, cookies and release pace.
Uncapped free edition, log import and a CNIL switch
- No caps on the free edition: the self-hosted Community edition puts no limit on users or hits, and it already covers e-commerce, campaign and event tracking, segmentation, visitor profiles and scheduled email reports.
- Server log import:
import_logs.py(Python 3), bundled with Matomo, loads Apache, Nginx, IIS, HAProxy or CloudFront access logs into the same reports as the JavaScript tracker, in batches or continuously through syslog. Visitors whose ad blocker stops tracking scripts still get counted. - One switch for the CNIL setup: since 5.9, a per-site option applies the configuration that the French regulator's consent exemption expects, and a self-assessment table walks through each CNIL criterion.
Paid add-ons and hardware sized to your traffic
Advanced features are paid plugins. The core is GPL, but funnels, heatmaps, session recording, form analytics and custom reports are sold separately. Funnels and Heatmap & Session Recording, for instance, ship under the InnoCraft EULA, a proprietary license. The entry yearly bundle, Team, costs €275 for up to 4 users and 5 million hits a month. Open Web Analytics, another PHP analytics tool, has heatmaps and session replay out of the box.
Hardware grows with traffic. Matomo's documentation suggests 2 CPUs, 2 GB of RAM and a 50 GB SSD up to 100,000 pageviews a month, and 4 CPUs with 8 GB up to a million. Reports are processed when someone opens them by default; past a few hundred visits a day, the docs recommend running core:archive every hour from cron. For a high-traffic WordPress site, Matomo points to the self-hosted edition or the cloud rather than the plugin.
Dropping the consent banner takes one setting and ongoing care. The CNIL, France's data protection authority, exempts audience measurement from consent when it produces only anonymous statistics, is not combined with other processing and does not follow people across sites; the CNIL certifies no tool. Matomo's Enforce compliance option (Administration > Privacy > Compliance) masks two bytes of the IP address, strips campaign parameters, restricts e-commerce tracking and sets retention to 759 days. It also turns off the visits log, visitor profiles, heatmaps and A/B testing, and deletes existing experiments. The site owner still has to provide an opt-out, keep personal data out of URLs, page titles and events, and cap cookie lifetime at 13 months. Matomo sets cookies by default unless the tracking code calls disableCookies; Umami says it sets none.
Log import misses what only the browser knows. Access logs carry no screen resolution, page titles or events, and the importer does not work with the WordPress plugin. To read logs without running a database or an analytics instance, GoAccess turns the log file straight into a terminal dashboard or an HTML report.
Releases land almost monthly. Eight minor versions shipped between late January and late September 2026, 5.7.0 through 5.14.0, and the latest stable, 5.14.1, came out on 4 October 2026. Version 6.0 has been in beta since 7 September 2026 and raises the floor to PHP 8.1 and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6.