BYOViral vs Matomo

Self-hosting or a hosted service

Matomo On-Premise is free software under the GNU GPL v3 (or later), with unlimited users and hits. You supply the server, the database, updates and backups. Its premium plugins come under a separate commercial license and are sold individually or in bundles.

Matomo Cloud removes the server work. Its Business plan includes 30 sites and 30 users, keeps raw data for 24 months and reports with no time limit, applies no data sampling, and is hosted in Frankfurt. There is a 21-day trial without a credit card.

BYOViral is only available as a hosted service. You add a one-line script and get a live visitor list, daily totals and the extras of your plan. There is nothing to install and nothing to self-host.

Matomo Cloud prices next to BYOViral

Matomo Cloud yearly billing costs ten times the monthly price, and plans above ten million hits are quoted individually. Matomo shows prices in your local currency. On the self-hosted side, plugin bundles start at €275 a month for Team, and single plugins are priced by user count; Heatmap & Session Recording, for example, ranges from €219 to €3,459 a year.

BYOViral's three plans cost $0, $5 and $9 a month whatever your traffic. They differ in the size of each site's visitor log (500, 10,000 or 100,000 visitors) and in extras: Premium adds CSV export, alerts, goals and simple funnels, Search Console queries and uptime checks; Ultra adds visitor and IP labels, a daily briefing and API access.

Features Matomo has and BYOViral does not try to match

• Heatmaps and session recordings.
• A/B testing and full funnel analysis.
• Matomo Tag Manager.
• Roll-up reporting across many sites.
• Direct access to raw data in your own database when you self-host.

If any of these drive your decision, Matomo is the more complete tool. BYOViral focuses on a quick read of who is visiting, where they came from, whether they look human, and how the site is doing over time.

Privacy defaults side by side

Matomo's features page lists first-party cookies as the default. IP anonymization is switched on by default and masks two bytes of the address; you can raise that to three bytes or mask the whole address. Since Matomo 4 there is also a setting to force tracking without cookies.

BYOViral sets no cookies and uses no browser storage, and its script is about 650 bytes. It does keep full IP addresses in each site's visitor log, together with network, approximate location, browser and referrer, because the live visitor list and bot labeling depend on them. The log holds the last 500, 10,000 or 100,000 visitors depending on your plan, and daily totals contain no IP addresses.

Whichever you choose, the tracking tool is only one part of the consent question. What else your pages load, and where your visitors are, matter just as much.

What running Matomo yourself involves

Self-hosting gives you full control, and with it the chores: keeping PHP and MySQL or MariaDB updated, applying Matomo updates, archiving reports on a schedule, backing up a database that grows with every visit, and keeping the server secure. Teams with an operations person usually manage this well. A solo site owner may prefer not to.

If you are unsure, a common route is to start with a hosted tool and move to self-hosting only when a requirement forces it.

Using both

Some teams keep Matomo for heatmaps, recordings and A/B tests and add BYOViral for a fast live view, bot labeling and a public stats page. The two scripts do not interfere. BYOViral has no importer for Matomo history, so your Matomo reports remain the record for past periods.