For those who have tried both Matomo analytics and the Ghost 6 native analytics powered by TinyBird, I’m curious how you compare them.
Matomo is more powerful, but Tinybird is nicely integrated into the admin area. If you are self-hosting, would you both for the best-of-both worlds, or pick one for simplicity?
I used to use Matomo (including back when it was called Piwik) for my Ghost site until I switched to Plausible, which I then cancelled when I heard Ghost’s usage of Tinybird was on the way.
I found Matomo to be very nice and very detailed, and had no complaints about it. The only “advantage” I can think of is the way new visits (and their details) appeared in a chronological list, which on the occasion when a piece you wrote went somewhat viral it was amusing to see the visitors roll in: poof, poof, poof. The mobile app was amusing to have as well.
In terms of Plausible, which has a closer resemblance to Ghost’s usage of Tinybird than Matomo does, the only advantage I can see with it over Ghost is that (like Matomo) it has more granular detail. For example, when clicking on GitHub (under “Top sources”) in Ghost’s analytics one is taken to GitHub itself. When clicking on GitHub in Plausible (see its demo site here) one gets taken to a more granular page where one can see the assortment of particular GitHub pages from where all those GitHub visits came from.
That being said, I did see on Product Hunt that there’s more to come for Ghost’s analytics, so who knows what else will be added.
Otherwise, unless you need the granular detail, and/or like the dopamine hit of seeing all those visitors coming in, I can’t really see the need for Matomo. Meanwhile, the way the TinyBird data isn’t held externally but is tightly integrated into Ghost itself (such as with newsletter data, growth data, MRR data, being able to click into the post itself, etc.) is a nice advantage.
Having said all that, although I don’t really have any interest in a Ghost mobile app (cause it’d be too small and awkward to write on), I actually wouldn’t mind a Ghost app solely for analytics reference and ActivityPub usage.
FWIW – I’ve used Clicky since forever, and have found it to do all I need. Obvs, I’ll try out what’s in the admin as well, but for now I’m satisfied with Clicky.
I’m going to stick with only Matomo for now. I like that’s a single additional container that can share the same MySQL database as Ghost.
I’m trying to keep my time spend on Ghost to be centered on content creation, which means keeping the tech stack simple and changing it less frequently.
I remain intrigued by the native analytics option and may try it later.
