My new website is hosted on Netlify, which is an awesome service for hosting static websites. Recently, they launched an Analytics Platform as an alternative to Google Analytics. My impressions of this new tool isn’t quite as enthusiastic as their service in general, but it does have some nice features.
Pros:
Server Side
- Can’t be blocked by Ad-Blockers
- Tracks requests of non-web-page assets like RSS feeds, images, etc
- No impact on your client side performance since there’s no Javascript library
Privacy Centric
- Isn’t connected to an ad network that’s building a database of what sites you’re browsing
Cons:
Server Side
- You can’t track any user behavior via Javascript. I never do this anyway, but many sites do.
Extremely barebones
- No way to filter users by geography, browser, OS, etc
- No way to exclude people by IP address. I generally like to exclude my house and my office.
- No way to track conversions / goals
Expensive!
- $9/month is expensive for such a barebones feature set. Particular when compared to $0 for Google Analytics.
- This is somewhat mitigated for me by the fact that my site falls under the free tier of their hosting service.
Conclusion:
I like the general premise of Netlify Analytics, but given the lack of features and price, I suspect that I’ll cancel it off after a month or two. But I’d wager that this is just the MVP for what will eventually become a much more comprehensive tool. So perhaps check back in a year.