AWStats vs Google Analytics — A Privacy-Friendly Alternative

Server-side analytics that work without cookies, JavaScript, or tracking your visitors.

Google Analytics is powerful but tracks your visitors across the web. AWStats reads your server logs directly — no cookies, no JavaScript, no third-party data collection. Willem compared both and switched.

Google Analytics requires a JavaScript snippet on every page that sends visitor data to Google's servers. This data is used for advertising, shared across Google products, and requires cookie consent banners in the EU.

AWStats takes a completely different approach: it reads your web server's access logs (Apache, Nginx) and generates statistics locally. No JavaScript, no cookies, no external requests. Your visitors' data never leaves your server.

The trade-off: AWStats can't track JavaScript-driven interactions (clicks, scroll depth, single-page apps). But for most websites, the server logs tell you everything you need: pages viewed, referrers, countries, browsers, bandwidth.

Willem runs AWStats on all his sites and supplements it with Plausible for privacy-friendly real-time stats.

From Willem's writing on self-hosting your own infrastructure.