Open Web Analytics (OWA)
Summary
Open Web Analytics (OWA) is a self-hostable, privacy-preserving open-source web-analytics framework, distributed under GPL-2.0, designed as a free alternative to commercial tools such as Google Analytics. It is the canonical reference for organisations that want web analytics without sending user data to a Big Tech provider — the same operational discipline Framasoft’s sovereign-tools migration guide applies to email, documents, and conferencing, applied to web analytics.
Body
https://www.openwebanalytics.com/
Open Web Analytics describes itself as “a free and open source web analytics framework that lets you stay in control of how you instrument and analyze the use of your websites and applications.” [source: open-web-analytics] It is the canonical privacy-respecting alternative to Google Analytics for organisations whose threat model or values do not allow user-data collection by a Big Tech provider — small NGOs, activist groups, privacy-conscious publishers, and any campaign site that wants to know its own traffic without outsourcing that knowledge to a third party. [source: open-web-analytics]
The project is hosted on GitHub at github.com/Open-Web-Analytics/Open-Web-Analytics. The repository has 2,700+ stars and 488 forks as of mid-2026 and is published under the GNU General Public License v2.0 (GPL-2.0). [source: open-web-analytics] The GPL-2.0 license means the software is free to use, modify, and redistribute; derivative works must also be distributed under GPL-2.0. For documentation summaries in this wiki the practical effect is the same as CC-BY: paraphrase and attribute, do not paste long passages verbatim.
OWA’s functional model mirrors Google Analytics’s familiar features (page views, unique visitors, referrers, custom event tracking, click heatmaps, e-commerce tracking) but with the data living on a server the operator controls. [source: open-web-analytics] The setup requires PHP and MySQL on a server the operator already maintains; many smaller organisations find the operational burden of self-hosting outweighs the privacy benefit and end up using a hosted privacy-respecting alternative (Plausible, Matomo Cloud, Fathom) instead. [source: open-web-analytics]
OWA is one of several self-hostable analytics options. Matomo (formerly Piwik) is the more actively developed alternative and the one most large NGOs use when they want self-hosting; Plausible and Fathom are the canonical lighter-weight hosted alternatives. The wiki does not evaluate which is best; OWA is the reference for the self-hostable, GPL-licensed, fully-free end of the spectrum.
OWA is the privacy-preserving web-analytics counterpart to the sovereign-tools discipline covered by Framasoft’s Guide de transition numérique for an association migrating off Big Tech. [source: open-web-analytics][source: framasoft-guide-transition] An organisation that has already migrated its email, documents, and conferencing off Big Tech infrastructure can use OWA as the missing analytics layer that completes the migration without re-introducing a Big-Tech dependency.
Use it for
A reference for a self-hostable, privacy-preserving web-analytics option; a teaching artefact for an organisation considering the sovereign-tools migration covered by Framasoft; a tool choice when the constraint is “must be free software, must not send data to Big Tech” rather than “must be lowest-friction to set up.”