Open Web Analytics review: the free, open-source, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. Features, WordPress plugin, licensing, and top alternatives.
Open Web Analytics is a free, open-source web analytics framework created by developer Peter Adams, with project history dating back to 2006. It is built in PHP with a MySQL backend and is designed to be self-hosted, giving website owners a Google Analytics-style tracking tool that keeps all visitor data on infrastructure they control.
The project is licensed under GPL v2 and maintained publicly on GitHub, with an active WordPress plugin and PHP SDK making it straightforward to add to existing sites and applications without relying on a third-party analytics vendor.
OWA tracks visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions, and custom configurable actions across an unlimited number of websites from a single installation, with a dashboard-based reporting portal supporting multiple user accounts.
Beyond standard traffic analytics, OWA includes heatmap generation to visualize clicks and scrolling behavior, a session-visualization feature called DOMstream, and geolocation tracking, alongside a REST API and extensible module framework for developers who want to build custom tracking or reporting on top of the platform.
Open Web Analytics is completely free and open source under the GPL v2 license, with no paid tiers, usage limits, or commercial hosted version offered by the project.
Because there is no company monetizing OWA directly, ongoing development is supported through community contributions and voluntary donations rather than subscription revenue.
Yes, OWA is completely free and open source under the GPL v2 license, with no paid tiers or usage-based pricing.
It was created by developer Peter Adams, with project history in the codebase dating back to 2006.
Yes, there is no official hosted SaaS version; OWA is designed to be installed on your own PHP and MySQL server.
Yes, there is an official WordPress plugin that integrates OWA tracking directly into WordPress sites.
Yes, OWA includes heatmap generation to visualize where visitors click and scroll, along with a session-visualization feature called DOMstream.
OWA offers similar visitor and pageview tracking capabilities but as self-hosted, open-source server software, giving organizations full control of their data instead of sending it to Google.
Both are free, open-source, self-hosted analytics platforms; Matomo has a larger active community and more frequent releases, while OWA is a lighter-weight alternative with a longer history dating back to 2006.