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Thanks for doing the research on this. But I think that this plugin is likely to run into the same problems as the old Statpress. It stores visitor/hit data in database tables, and these tables grow enormously over time, causing problems with website performance, with backup, with maintenance workflows, etc. Aside from database overhead, these sorts of plugins wreak havoc on our caching system: either (a) they're built in such a way that cached requests don't register in the statistics, making them not very useful indicators of visits, or (b) they require the non-cached site to be loaded (potentially via some sort of async js bit) every time the page is loaded, which is essentially the same thing from a performance point of view as turning caching off on the site.

I think that any recommended solution is going to have to integrate with a third-party service. Copying Ray and Jeremy here in case they have more thoughts.

I've done a quick look at the available third-party hosted website analytics options out there and I think Clicky is decent.

Clicky has a free plan that allows for up to 3000 pageviews per day, which is much better than Jetpack Stats's 1000 pageviews per month. Plugin is by a 3rd-party developer though: https://wordpress.org/plugins/clicky-analytics/.

A good alternative is Simple Analytics. No cap on pageviews, but their pricing differentiator is retention; they only offer one month of history on their free plan, which might not be good enough for some users. Also analytics must be viewed from their site as there is no embedded integration.

• PostHog - Free plan allows for 1,000,000 events per month and 1-year history retention. WordPress plugins are 3rd-party; there are two plugins available on wp.org. Here's one of them: https://wordpress.org/plugins/integrate-posthog-web-analytics/. UI integration with WordPress is minimal as you simply enter PostHog's API key into a settings page. PostHog's analytics must be viewed on their website.
• Umami - Similar to PostHog, WordPress plugin is 3rd-party - https://wordpress.org/plugins/integrate-umami/. Analytics must be viewed from their site. However, the dev plans on adding an admin widget in the future. Free plan allows for 100,000 events per month, also has six-month history retention.
• Amplitude - 10,000 tracked users (not pageviews) per month on their free plan - https://amplitude.com/pricing.
• AFS Analytics - 20,000 pageviews per month and current-year history retention on their free plan - https://www.afsanalytics.com/pricing.

We can try a couple of these on cdev to see which ones will work well from a user's perspective.

Thanks for testing, Scott. There also appears to be another Clicky admin page located at "Dashboard > Clicky Analytics":

Do we like Clicky enough to recommend it as our Jetpack Stats replacement?

If we wanted to test another analytics option that has better WP admin integration, of the other options I listed above, AFS Analytics is the only other one that fits this criteria. However the free, monthly pageview limit for AFS is 20,000 whereas Clicky is 90,000 for a 30-day period.

Thanks for looking into this Scott, and glad to see that Clicky has some solutions for these issues. What do you think about updating our GA-alternative documentation to incorporate this? Maybe even include the same quotes?

I think this is a good idea. But I think Clicky is only available on the Dev site now. Should we ask Boone to promote it to production?

This is already slated for the 2.7.0 release on April 7, but we can move it back to the 2.6.9 release on March 24 if others would like.

If it isn't a big deal to push it to March 24, that might be nice to let Scott get a head start on documenting/screenshotting this before focusing on the April 7 release items.