Top 5 Yandex.Metrica Alternatives

Yandex.Metrica is a website analytics platform owned by the Russian company Yandex. It provides free analytics services, including features like traffic stats, event tracking, purchase funnels and even session replays and heatmaps.

Why is Yandex.Metrica free?

As mentioned in their own FAQ, one of the reasons why the platform is free is because it enables Yandex to collect massive amounts of data to feed into machine learning systems. Not only can this lead to huge privacy and GDPR issues but it is also unclear what the data is used for.

Top 5 analytics alternatives to Yandex.Metrica

1. UXWizz
   Self-hosted platform with stats, heatmaps, session recordings and more. The dashboard has been recently rebuilt from scratch and it receives frequent updates.

2. Matomo
   Self-hosted and open-source, previously known as Piwik, it also has a cloud offering. Unforunately the heatmaps and session-recordings are not provided in the open-source version.

3. Google Analytics
   The most popular analytics platform.
   Using it might still lead to privacy issues compared to self-hosted analytics. It lacks features like session recordings and heatmaps.

4. Clicky
   Does come with core analytics functionality and heatmaps but no session recordings. The platform feels a bit basic/outdated compared to Yandex.Metrica.

5. Lucky Orange
   The platform was recently updated to a new version, might be worth checking out. Unfortunately it doesn't provide the indepth analytical quantitative data that Yandex.Metrica does, being focused on the qualitative data.

Are there other good alternatives?

Yes!
There is a community-managed list of analytics platforms on GitHub called Awesome Analytics (doesn't include all analaytics platforms, but it's pretty comprehensive).