Matomo is powerful, open source and yours to self-host, and that openness is real: you own the data, you run the code, nothing is sampled. The cost is assembly. The features people actually want, heatmaps, funnels, SEO rankings, are paid premium plugins you choose and wire up one by one, the Cloud bill is metered by hits so it climbs as your traffic grows, and running without a consent banner is something you configure yourself. mandera starts on the other side of all that setup: cookieless and banner-free on day one, one flat price that already includes a million pageviews, everything in the product with no plugins to buy, and an agentic engine that does not just measure your data but acts on it.
| mandera | Matomo | |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy & hosting | ||
| Cookieless, no consent banner | ✓ by default | ◐ configurable; consent-exempt once set up¹ ² |
| Data location | ✓ Germany, EU | ✓ EU/Frankfurt on Cloud, or self-host³ ⁴ |
| Open source / self-hostable | ✕ hosted SaaS | ✓ GPL v3, Community edition⁵ ⁶ |
| Core traffic analytics (pageviews, visits, sources, countries, devices) | ✓ | ✓ included in Core⁷ |
| Behavior & analytics | ||
| Heatmaps (click, scroll, mouse) | ✓ included, aggregated | ◐ paid premium plugin⁸ |
| Session recordings | ✕ by design | ✓ paid premium plugin⁸ |
| Funnels with predefined steps | ✕ aggregated User Flow | ✓ paid premium plugin⁹ |
| Conversion goals | ✕ | ✓ included in Core⁷ |
| A/B testing | ✕ | ✓ paid premium plugin¹³ |
| Growth & AI | ||
| Your SEO keyword rankings | ✓ native, weekly, no wiring | ◐ paid plugin, connect Google/Bing/Yahoo¹⁰ |
| AI that acts (opportunities, content, strategy) | ✓ | ✕ AI tracks AI-traffic only¹¹ |
| Data export / API / scheduled email reports | ✕ in-dashboard | ✓ included in Core⁷ |
| Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | One flat price, 1 million pageviews per month included | Billed by hits on Cloud, climbs with traffic; or self-host for free³ ⁵ |
| Free trial | ✓ 7 days, 10 opportunities | ✓ 21 days, no credit card¹² |
| Free-forever | ✕ | ✓ self-hosted Community edition⁵ |
If you want to own and host your own analytics and assemble exactly the feature set you need, Matomo is a genuinely strong choice. The rest of this page is for people who would rather have it all included, working on day one, and acting on their growth without the build.
Matomo, made by InnoCraft in New Zealand, has earned its standing as the open analytics platform. Its Core and JavaScript tracker are open source under the GPL v3, which means you can read the code, run it yourself and keep full ownership of your data with no lock-in.⁵ ⁶ Self-hosting the Community edition is free forever: you host it, it is yours.⁵ Matomo states it gives you 100% data ownership and 100% unsampled data, so your reports reflect every visit rather than an estimate, and Matomo Cloud is hosted on AWS in Frankfurt, Germany, inside the EU.³ ⁴ For a team that wants to own its analytics outright, that is a real and rare thing, and it is central to Matomo's appeal.
It is also deep and mature. Beyond core traffic analytics, Goals and conversion tracking, multi-format data export and a full Reporting API, Matomo offers a broad catalog of premium plugins you can layer on: Heatmaps and Session Recording, Funnels, A/B Testing, Form Analytics, Media Analytics and SEO keyword rankings, alongside a tag manager and custom reports.⁷ ⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹³ Scheduled email reports come built in, and exports run to CSV, XML and JSON.⁷ If your requirement is "give me an analytics platform I can host, own and extend exactly as I like", Matomo answers it well, and choosing the tool you can build to fit is a virtue, not a shortfall.
Everything below is a live demo, not a screenshot. Click around.
Start with the basics. Traffic trends, page views, visit duration, sources, top pages: everything you'd open Matomo to check, mandera answers just as calmly and without a banner, no plugins to install, nothing to configure. Think of this as the baseline, not the sales pitch. Where the two part ways is everything that happens after the counting, and how much of it you have to build yourself.
In Matomo, funnels and the deeper journey views are premium plugins you add and define step by step.⁹ mandera's User Flow takes a different route: it maps real, aggregated journeys through your site, where people enter, where they go next, where they leave, with no funnel steps to define and no individual tracked. The detours you'd never have guessed, and the exact pages where a journey ends, surface on their own, with nothing to wire up first.
Matomo offers heatmaps through its Heatmap & Session Recording premium plugin, which you buy and add to your install.⁸ With mandera, every page you track gets click, scroll and mouse movement heatmaps built in, with no extra plugin, no extra script and no extra invoice. Clicks, reading depth and the areas that hold attention are all there, aggregated and switched on from the start.
Session recording is the one thing mandera deliberately leaves out. That same Matomo plugin can record individual sessions, and for teams who want it, it is there.⁸ We left it out on purpose. Following a single visitor step by step is about as invasive as behaviour tracking gets, and that has no place in a privacy-first product. Aggregated heat, yes. Surveillance replays, no.
Matomo can show SEO keyword rankings through its Search Engine Keywords Performance premium plugin, which pulls your positions from Google, Bing and Yahoo APIs that you connect and authenticate yourself.¹⁰ It is capable, and it is another paid plugin to add and configure on top of your install.
Every keyword you already rank for is pulled in natively and refreshed once a week, with nothing for you to add by hand. No plugin to buy, no Google, Bing or Yahoo API to wire up, no manual rank tracker, no setup. Your rankings sit next to the real traffic they send you, so you finally see where you stand in search without leaving your analytics.
Matomo introduced AI Assistants in March 2026, and they do a specific, useful thing: they track the traffic arriving at your site from AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.¹¹ What Matomo does not have, and does not claim to have, is an agentic AI that generates growth opportunities, writes your content or builds your strategy. That is a clean, honest line, and it draws the edge of its category.
mandera's AI is built to act, not only to answer. The Agentic Engine works across your traffic, rankings and site at once, finds the openings buried in that data, and helps you build each one into a strategy with ready-to-use content across 69 languages. A Context suite (Brand Memory) learns your business so the work sounds like you. The AI runs on Mistral in the EU and France, and you approve everything that touches your site. Counting your numbers is one thing; moving them is another, and that gap is where mandera works.
Matomo is privacy-capable, and it is fair to say so generously. Matomo can run cookieless, using a randomly-seeded, time-limited config_id hash rather than a cookie, and France's data protection authority, the CNIL, has confirmed Matomo can be used without tracking consent once it is configured that way.¹ ² IP masking is on by default, so Matomo receives the visitor's IP and then masks it.² Matomo states it gives you 100% data ownership and that Matomo Cloud is GDPR-compliant.⁴ The thing to know is that these are settings you configure: cookieless mode, consent-exempt operation and the rest are choices you make, not the out-of-the-box default.
mandera is cookieless and banner-free by default, with nothing to configure: there is no cookie, no consent banner, and the IP is dropped on arrival rather than received and then masked. Data is stored in Germany, inside the EU. The two products share real privacy ground, both can run without a consent banner and keep data in the EU, and the honest difference is one of defaults: Matomo gives you the controls to reach that state, while mandera arrives there on its own. This is an architectural difference, stated neutrally, not a verdict on either tool.
See our full privacy & compliance page, written for your legal team: hosting, sub-processors, data location, retention and your rights, on one page.
Matomo gives you two routes. Self-hosting the Community edition is free forever, the open source path where you run it yourself.⁵ Matomo Cloud is the hosted option, and it is billed by hits rather than pageviews. A hit, in Matomo's model, is a pageview or an event or a download or an outlink or an onsite search or a content-tracking request, so a site with one million pageviews generates more than one million hits and lands above the one-million-hit tier.³ Cloud starts around €29 per month for 50,000 hits and scales up with volume, with annual billing advertised as two months free.³ That is a flexible model, and it means your Cloud bill is tied to your traffic: more visitors and more events move you up the tiers. There is no permanent free Cloud tier; the free route is self-hosting.⁵
mandera is a subscription with one flat fee that includes 1 million pageviews per month, a ceiling most websites never get near, and within it the price does not climb as your traffic or your events grow, so a spike in visitors is purely good news. Matomo Cloud's free trial runs 21 days with no credit card; mandera's runs 7 days and includes 10 high-impact opportunities to get you started.¹² The flat fee covers the whole system: analytics, heatmaps, SEO rankings, User Flow, and the AI engine with opportunities, strategies and content, with no premium plugins to add. Don't measure it against a metered analytics bill, but against the pile of plugins it makes unnecessary.
Everything the analytics suite measures also feeds mandera's agentic engine, a deeply integrated, multilayered AI system that works automatically. The engine turns your data into growth opportunities and ready-to-use strategies. Hover any stage to see how it flows, or jump straight to another suite below.
Subscribe to mandera and put the whole system to work on your growth. Your free trial includes 10 high-impact opportunities to get you started.
Start free trialPartial means the capability exists with a documented condition or extra step: Matomo can run cookieless and consent-exempt, but only once you configure it, with IP masking on by default after the IP is received¹ ²; Matomo's heatmaps and SEO keyword rankings exist as paid premium plugins under the InnoCraft EULA, with the SEO rankings plugin pulling positions from Google, Bing and Yahoo APIs you connect⁸ ¹⁰. mandera does not offer session recordings, funnels with predefined steps, conversion goals, A/B testing, data export, a public API, scheduled email reports, self-hosting or a free-forever tier; those are genuine Matomo strengths.
Sources. ¹ Cookie consent: Matomo can run cookieless and France's CNIL confirms it can be used without tracking consent once configured (matomo.org/cookie-consent/) · ² Privacy settings: cookieless config_id hash (randomly seeded, time-limited), IP masking on by default (matomo.org/faq/general/configure-privacy-settings-in-matomo/) · ³ Pricing and hits: Matomo Cloud billed by hits (pageview, event, download, outlink, onsite search or content-tracking request), from around €29/month for 50,000 hits, annual billing two months free, Cloud hosted on AWS in Frankfurt, Germany (matomo.org/pricing/) · ⁴ Cloud privacy and subprocessors: Matomo states 100% data ownership, unsampled data and that Matomo Cloud is GDPR-compliant; AWS Frankfurt with some ancillary services touching the USA (matomo.org/matomo-cloud-privacy-policy/, matomo.org/matomo-cloud-dpa/subprocessors/) · ⁵ Licenses and self-hosting: Core and JS tracker open source under GPL v3, self-hosted Community edition free forever (matomo.org/faq/general/matomo-analytics-licences-for-core-tracker-and-plugins/, matomo.org/pricing/) · ⁶ Maker: InnoCraft, a New Zealand company (matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/who-is-innocraft/) · ⁷ Product features: core analytics, Goals and conversion tracking, data export to CSV/XML/JSON, Reporting API, scheduled email reports (matomo.org/product-features/) · ⁸ Heatmap and Session Recording premium plugin (plugins.matomo.org/HeatmapSessionRecording) · ⁹ Funnels premium plugin (plugins.matomo.org/Funnels) · ¹⁰ Search Engine Keywords Performance premium plugin, pulls rankings via Google, Bing and Yahoo APIs you connect (plugins.matomo.org/SearchEngineKeywordsPerformance) · ¹¹ AI Assistants (introduced March 2026) track traffic arriving from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot (matomo.org/faq/reports/what-are-ai-assistants-in-matomo/) · ¹² Free trial: Matomo Cloud 21-day free trial, no credit card (matomo.org/faq/cloud/whats-included-in-the-matomo-cloud-21-day-free-trial/, verified 14 June 2026) · ¹³ A/B Testing premium plugin, Matomo Marketplace (plugins.matomo.org, verified 14 June 2026). Feature availability and limits may depend on plan or plugin.
Feature information verified on 14 June 2026, based on each provider's public documentation. Spotted something outdated? Let us know and we'll put it right.
Matomo is a trademark of its respective owner. mandera is not affiliated with Matomo.