Why Use Ackee Instead of Google Analytics?
Table of Contents
Introduction
Google Analytics is a well-known and popular web analytics tool. It’s easy to use, it’s free, and it comes with many useful features. However, it also collects a lot of data about your users — even if you don’t want that information or don’t have the resources to store it yourself. Ackee is an alternative solution that doesn’t collect any personal data and respects your users’ privacy while still providing great insights into how people interact with your website.
Ackee is a node.js based, self-hosted analytics tool designed to respect your users’ privacy.
Ackee is an open source and self-hosted analytics tool designed to respect your users’ privacy. It’s written in node.js, so it’s fast and easy to install.
- Ackee is an open source project with multiple contributors around the world (even you can contribute!). This means that we’re committed to making sure that the code stays free of bugs and doesn’t have any backdoors or other security issues.
- You control your data: because ackee lives on your own server, you retain full ownership over all of your data and aren’t subject to changes in policy such as those made by Google when it rolled out its new privacy policy last year.
- Ackee respects user privacy by not collecting personally identifiable information from users - no IP addresses are ever logged!
Ackee runs on your server and stores the data in a MongoDB database, which you also have to host yourself.
You’ll have to host the database on your own server. If you have a small website, hosting a MongoDB database on AWS or DigitalOcean may be an option. You can also opt for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that comes with MongoDB already installed. For larger websites, however, we recommend using a dedicated server instead.
Even though Ackee is free and open source, it requires some technical know-how to install and configure properly—especially if you’re not hosting your site in the cloud. If you are comfortable managing servers yourself and want full control over how Ackee works, then go right ahead! But if you don’t have much experience with this kind of thing yet, we would recommend looking at other analytics solutions first before taking on this project by yourself.
The Ackee project consists of two main parts: a lightweight JavaScript snippet (tracking script), and the server application.
- Tracking script - The tracking script is the part of Ackee that does all the heavy lifting. It tracks and collects data about your users as they move through your site, and sends that data to a dashboard on our server.
- Server application - The server application is used to view, analyze and make decisions based on the information collected by Ackee’s tracking scripts. You can access this dashboard by logging in at ackee-server.com
Ackee is free and open source!
Ackee is free and open source. That means it’s free to use, modify and distribute. It also means that Ackee can be used commercially without a license. You can even contribute to the development of Ackee if you want!
Ackee works in a similar way as other commercial analytics tools but respects your users’ privacy.
Ackee works in a similar way as other commercial analytics tools but respects your users’ privacy. Unlike Google Analytics, Ackee doesn’t track any personal information on your users. All it does is collect data about their interactions with the website (such as clicks and scrolls) and display this information to you in an easy-to-read report.
Conclusion
Ackee is a great alternative to Google Analytics. It’s lightweight, free and open source! You can run it on your own server and access the data anytime you want. If you are interested in testing Ackee then I encourage you to download the project from https://github.com/ackeesoftware/ackee-server/. If this article has piqued your interest in privacy issues surrounding online tracking then check out our blog post about cookie syncing: https://blog.scoutee.com/cookie-sync-initiatives/.