Alternatives to Adobe Analytics

What changes when you move off Adobe Analytics

Three things change at once, and only one is the invoice.

The first is the unit. Adobe sizes a contract by monthly server calls, the hits your pages and apps send to its collection servers, and the quote also depends on the number of sites and apps, the features, the users, the integrations and the contract length. Adobe adds that the real cost includes implementation, training and administration. The tools above bill by pageviews, events or hits, which is why the price column shows a unit rather than a difference.

The second is the reporting model. Reports are built in Analysis Workspace from report suites, with props, eVars, classifications, calculated metrics and segments defined over years. A lighter tool has pages, sources, countries, devices and its own idea of an event. Bot handling moves too: Adobe applies the IAB spiders and bots list plus up to 500 custom rules per report suite, while the tools above filter with vendor lists.

The third is where data is processed. Adobe runs processing for Analytics in Oregon, London and Singapore, and its privacy overview names no location in the EU. IP addresses can be hashed or removed before storage, and Adobe says customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa usually have hashing on by default.

What to check before you switch

1. What you can take out, and how deep. Data feeds deliver an hourly or daily export of raw data, one row per hit and one column per variable, to a cloud destination. Data Warehouse answers a request wizard with a spreadsheet and no row limit. Workspace projects go out as CSV or PDF on a schedule.
2. How far back it reaches. The default retention policy is 25 months, extensions are sold by the year, up to eight of them, and Adobe states that data past the policy may be deleted with no option for recovery.
3. What holds the visitor together. Identification relies on first-party cookies such as s_ecid, with the main visitor ID cookie lasting 13 months and IP address and user agent as a last resort. Tools that store nothing in the browser count returning visitors differently.
4. Where the tag lives. Recommended collection runs through the Web SDK extension in a tag property in Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection, with data travelling over Adobe’s Edge Network. Removing Adobe means editing that property, not deleting a snippet from a template.
5. What else reads the report suite. Adobe products such as Target and Audience Manager share audiences with Analytics, and those links stay behind.

Which of these can import your data

None of the tools above documents an importer that reads Adobe Analytics data. The connectors that exist were written for Google Analytics 4 and for named file formats, and an importer built for one format does not read another.

What that looks like in practice: Matomo imports aggregated reports from Google Analytics, creating a new website for each property, with the visitor log and segments unavailable for imported days, while Plausible, Fathom Analytics, Simple Analytics, Swetrix, Pirsch and TinyAnalytics each connect a Google account and pull a property with their own cut-offs. Piwik PRO states plainly that it does not import historical data from Google Analytics and suggests a reporting tool to hold both sets side by side; what it documents instead is importing web server logs.

Questions and answers

Can I keep my Adobe Analytics history?

Yes, as files you store yourself. Data feeds give raw hits and Data Warehouse gives spreadsheets, both delivered to a destination you choose. No tool in the table reads either format, so decide where the archive lives before the contract ends.

Will the numbers match after the switch?

No. Server calls, visits and pageviews count different things, Adobe recognises visitors by a first-party cookie, and bot filtering differs by vendor. Run both for a few weeks and compare trends, not totals. The cookieless page covers the methods.

What happens to the data if the contract ends?

Access ends with the contract, and data older than your retention policy may be gone already: 25 months by default unless extensions were bought. Export while the report suite is live.