Plausible vs GA vs Matomo. Part I.

Click the image above to see the infographic.

Prehistory

Website I have this analytics on is not the easiest target. Users get forwarded there right after the installation of PopUpOFF. And some guys (bots) are known to reinstall my extension programmatically. Let's see how our analytics will treat them.

There are 6 full days considered. I won't promise it's real data, but it's ~~plausible~~accurate for our needs. And our needs are:

to check the adequacy;
to compare accuracy;
to see how untrackable different browsers are;
to pick the best one;

Visits

Unique visitors. Different services detect "unique" in different ways. We can never know the real data, but GA looks like the weakest here, sorry Google.

Total pageviews. Let the fun begin. Plausible seemed good in unique visitors, but this one is "not plausible"(c). By the data we have we can say that Matomo and GA are very similar in this case. My logic tells me that they handle bots better.

Visit duration. Matomo and GA are ridiculous. Bounce rate was nonsense, so I just skipped it. Plausible seems like the strong leader here. What's next?

Installs

It's the data for all 6 days together. "From stores" is supposed to be equal to the total number of events. It's the number I get from Google store itself, for example. Edge doesn't provide any~~thing~~ data. There are few interesting points:

Plausible catched not a lot of unique Chrome installs. Unexpectedly bad.
Firefox blocks only GA, does it bad, though.
Opera users are the most uncatchable here. Good for them.
Google store's stats look not accurate:(

Results are similar. Though Plausible has disappointed me a bit. Let's see the last category, shall we?

Page events

Results look the same. GA is, as expected, behind - any privacy tool can block it nowadays. Plausible got a little bit more, assuming Matomo shows only total numbers, not unique.

Conclusion

Any tool will give you an average understanding of what's happening with your app or website. Most of the I-am-anonymous guys are going to be uncaught by all the tracking services anyway. Plausible, as I see it, will give you more accurate data.

There is a second part coming. Technical, UX and UI comparison.

P.S.

I'm using Brave browser. Haven't been tracked yet. Hello to all Firefox users:)