What are some good, lightweight, open-source alternatives to Google Analytics?

Deserves to be mentioned as it's around for quite a while. It was recently renamed from Piwik. Not sure about performance side but don't know any other which could compete with Google Analytics feature-wise.

I can't speak for the rebranded version, but piwik was a great analytics solution and paired well with many popular CMS flavors. For example, Dreamhost used to offer it as a one-click goodie for easy management, and it tied in well with WordPress.

i will try

Just a few months old, looks promising. Rather simple one.

Not sure its lightweight and not sure it counts as an alternative. But Fullstory's free tier has really helped us understand what our users were doing, with no extra cost.

I would definitely recommend this tool, and would also checkout Heap Analytics (www.heapanalytics.com), it's like Google Analytics on steroids.

This appears to be a potentially respectable alternative to Pi wik

It is not Open Source, but their code is minified and optimized and it only load after your website is fully loaded, therefor it does not slow down or add any additional time to website loading time. Hitsteps free forever plan is suitable for most startups during their early stages.

Scalable and great documentation :)

You can use Countly as a self hosted solution for your web, mobile and desktop apps. Community Edition is downloadable from Github: https://github.com/countly/count...

Reasons why I would suggest using Heap over Google Analytics: 1) They have automatic event tracking. So every pageview, click, form submission are tracked without additional work. 2) The Event Visualizer feature is a work of art and makes things 10x easier to create custom events. 3) They offer better insight in visitor tracking, and you don't need to set up custom configurations like you do in Google Analytics. I would also checkout this link for a deeper comparison between Google Analytics and Heap Analytics – https://heapanalytics.com/compar...

Indicative is great for mapping customer journeys and flows plus the free plan offers up to 1 Billion user actions/month. Much deeper insights than GA

Great pick for inspiration