Matomo is an open-source web analytics platform that you can host on your own servers or use as a hosted service. Its main selling point is control: your visitor data stays with you, rather than going to an advertising company. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is free, widely known, and tightly connected to Google Ads. Both are good tools; they suit different organizations.

We first wrote about Matomo in 2023. This version is a straighter comparison, and it corrects one thing the original glossed over: several of Matomo’s best-known features are paid add-ons.

The short answer

  • Choose GA4 if you advertise heavily on Google, want a free tool your team and agencies already know, and your privacy obligations allow sending visitor data to Google.
  • Choose Matomo if you need to keep analytics data in your own infrastructure or in the EU, work in healthcare or another regulated field, serve European audiences and want to limit consent prompts, or want raw, unsampled data without export limits.
  • Run both for a while if you are unsure. Comparing them side by side for a month shows you what each one tells you about your own traffic.

How they differ

  • Data ownership: with self-hosted Matomo, the data sits in your database, and you decide how long to keep it. GA4 data lives with Google; standard properties keep detailed event data for up to 14 months.
  • Raw data: Matomo gives you direct access to the raw visit data. GA4 offers a free export to BigQuery for standard properties, within a daily event limit, and hides some low-volume rows in reports to protect privacy.
  • Cost: GA4 is free. Matomo On-Premise is free software, but you pay for hosting and upkeep. Matomo Cloud is a paid subscription priced by traffic.
  • Add-on features: Matomo’s heatmaps and session recordings, funnels, A/B testing, and form analytics are premium features. Self-hosted installs buy them as plugins; check which ones your Cloud plan includes. Visitor logs, visitor profiles, goals, ecommerce tracking, and a tag manager come with the core product.
  • Advertising: GA4 shares audiences and conversions with Google Ads. Matomo can track campaigns from any source but does not feed ad platforms the same way.
  • Familiarity: far more marketers and agencies know GA4, and more tools integrate with it out of the box.

Analytics collects data about people’s visits, so privacy law applies either way. The difference is how much flexibility each tool gives you.

  • Europe: in the EU and UK, analytics cookies generally need consent. France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, lets audience measurement run without prior consent if it meets strict conditions, with an opt-out, and Matomo can be configured to meet them. Some other European regulators take similar positions. GA4 does not qualify, and Google requires its Consent Mode for advertising features used with visitors in the European Economic Area.
  • Cookieless tracking: Matomo can run without cookies, which reduces what is stored on the visitor’s device, though it does not on its own remove every legal requirement.
  • United States: state privacy laws require you to disclose what you collect and honor opt-outs, including the Global Privacy Control signal in California. Keeping data in-house makes some of those obligations simpler.

Healthcare and HIPAA

Healthcare is where the choice matters most. In 2022 the HHS Office for Civil Rights warned that tracking technologies on hospital and clinic websites can disclose protected health information to vendors. A federal court vacated part of that guidance in June 2024, the part covering an IP address combined with a visit to a public, unauthenticated page, but tracking on patient portals and other logged-in pages is still covered, and lawsuits over tracking pixels continue.

Google states that Google Analytics should not be used in ways that create HIPAA obligations, and it does not sign a business associate agreement for it. Self-hosted Matomo keeps the data in infrastructure you control, which is why many health organizations choose it; your hosting provider still needs to meet HIPAA requirements. We built encrypted forms and patient email for a HIPAA-secure clinic website, and analytics belongs in the same review. Involve your compliance team or counsel before deciding.

What Matomo is good at

  • Visitor log and profiles: see each visit’s pages, sources, and devices, and a returning visitor’s history, which is useful for understanding how B2B buyers research.
  • Accurate totals: self-hosted Matomo can track visitors who decline tracking cookies (with cookieless settings, where allowed), and first-party hosting is less often blocked than Google’s scripts, so counts tend to be fuller.
  • Custom reports and dashboards built on your own data, plus an API and direct database access for your BI tools.
  • A Google Analytics importer that can bring historical data across when you switch.

Making the switch

  1. Decide on hosting: Matomo Cloud, or self-hosted on a server you maintain and update.
  2. Recreate your goals and key events, campaign tracking, and ecommerce tracking.
  3. Configure privacy settings: IP anonymization, retention periods, cookieless or consent mode, and an opt-out.
  4. Run Matomo alongside GA4 for at least a month and compare the numbers.
  5. Update your privacy policy and cookie notice, then retire what you no longer need.

Where we come in

We can set up either one, including a self-hosted Matomo install, consent configuration, and dashboards. For the bigger picture of what to measure, see our guide to website analysis, or tell us about your site and your obligations and we will recommend a setup.