I've been on a slow march away from Google Analytics for about two years now. Three client projects, one personal blog, and a small SaaS — all moved over to privacy-focused alternatives. The decision usually starts with a cookie banner complaint and ends with someone asking "wait, why are we sending visitor data to an ad company again?"
If you're thinking about making the switch, this post walks through the three options I've actually shipped to production: Umami, Plausible, and Fathom. I'll cover what each does well, where they stumble, and what the migration actually looks like.
Why bother migrating at all?
The usual reasons, in roughly the order clients bring them up:
GDPR/ePrivacy compliance without the cookie banner gymnastics
