Quickly after starting French blog in 2014, I switched from Google Analytics to Piwik for my web analytics. It’s been since renamed Matomo in 2018. It’s been working pretty well for more than 10 years, and I’m thankful for the creator and maintainers.
Finding a modern alternative to Matomo #
In 2022 I started using Umami as well, with the intention of replacing Matomo. Matomo has barely evolved in terms of UI, and it feels pretty dated now. Umami, in comparison, has a much more modern and clean UI.
Matomo also has a lot of features, most of which I don’t use. It has a few gotchas like this weirdness around updating it in its Docker image. It terms of stack, Matomo is PHP + MySQL, Umami is a NextJS app with PostgreSQL. Not fundamentally different, but Umami is just simpler to host: automatic database migrations, no plugins, reduced feature set, etc.
Matomo dashboard. Very powerful and very busy
It’s been a few years now, and I’m happy with Umami! I’m feeling like it’s time to decommission my Matomo instance.
However Matomo holds my analytics data for angristan.fr and stanislas.blog for the past 10 years… I don’t want to lose that!
Building my own migration tool #
I tried searching for a way to export my data from Matomo and import it into Umami, but it doesn’t seem to exist. There is an open issue on this subject. It seems that their Cloud hosted version has an import feature, but it’s not open source. Fair!
I was able to create my own tool to do so, by studying the data models of both Matomo and Umami, and evaluating how to possibly map every field. It’s available as angristan/matomo-to-umami on GitHub.
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