Google Analytics is broken on a bunch of my sites thanks to the GA4 migration. Since I have to update everything anyways, I’m looking at the possibility of replacing Google Analytics with something I self-host that’s more privacy-focused.

I’ve tried Plausible, Umami and Swetrix (the latter of which I like the most). They’re all very lightweight and most are pretty efficient due to their use of a column-oriented database (Clickhouse) for storing the analytics data - makes way more sense than a row-oriented database like MySQL for this use case.

However, these systems are all cookie-less. This is usually fine, however one of my sites is commonly used in schools on their computers. Cookieless analytics works by tracking sessions based on IP address and user-agent, so in places like schools with one external IP and the same browser on every computer, it just looks like one user in the analytics. I’d like to know the actual number of users.

I’m looking for a similarly lightweight analytics system that does use cookies (first-party cookies only) to handle this particular use case. Does anyone know of one?

Thanks!

Edit: it doesn’t have to actually be a cookie - just being able to explicitly specify a session ID instead of inferring one based on IP and user-agent would suffice.