Piwik PRO vs. Matomo (Piwik): The most important differences explained

Choosing the right analytics platform boils down to these six factors:

• Performance & stability – Analytics projects always grow in one way or another. It can happen that your data volume will increase along with traffic and you’ll require more speed. Your analytics platform needs to support these needs.
• Security – Some companies, especially those from highly regulated sectors, must process data according to the highest security standards. This often means using a platform backed up by regular external security audits and hosted on ISO-27001 and SOC 2 certified infrastructure.
• Professional services and customer care – Availability of extensive support, user onboarding and training 
• Product use cases, reporting flexibility and integrations – Extra freedom in arranging and using your data as well as advanced integration with external systems (i.e. Google Ads or Google Search Console)
• Privacy compliance – Operating on fully anonymized data or using a product that simplifies compliance 
• Price – How much you’re able to invest in a web analytics platform

See how Matomo and Piwik PRO compare to each other:

If you still have some unanswered questions – keep reading. In the following chapters we’ll give you a more in-depth comparison of the products and the companies behind them.

Piwik PRO was established in 2013 and since then it has been providing an enterprise-level platform along with support for corporate clients and government organizations. The company has 100+ employees across multiple teams based in the EU and US, dedicated to customer success, technical support, product development, marketing and sales. In 2021, Piwik PRO launched Core – a free plan for their analytics platform.

Matomo (founded in 2007), on the other hand, is an open-source project. It was formerly known as Piwik until January 2018 when it rebranded. The same people are also the founders of InnoCraft – a consultancy providing premium plugins, cloud hosting and services for Matomo. In 2018, both businesses were merged into one and now appear under the same name (Matomo).

This explains the business relationship between companies. Now, let’s cover the functionalities of each platform.

With Piwik PRO Enterprise, you’ll get a fully-integrated Analytics Suite, consisting of:

• Analytics (used for Analytics for web and mobile, Analytics for product teams)
• Tag Manager
• Customer Data Platform (CDP)
• Consent Manager

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite offers wide possibilities for collecting and activating data. In addition to standard analytics, it also lets you:

• Perform data integration across marketing, sales and customer success tools and platforms. Easily integrate data using webhooks and automation tools. 
• Tie up visitor data scattered across channels and touchpoints into unified single customer view
• Connect siloed data sources into clear records to map the customer journey 
• Segment your clients and visitors based on any conditions, including demographic and behavioral data and build detailed audiences 
• Activate collected data through on-site retargeting (via your tools), remarketing, personalized emails and other communication channels.

Piwik PRO Core gives you all the modules and features of the Enterprise plan, except for Customer Data Platform.

Here’s how Piwik PRO user interface looks like:

Here’s how Matomo user interface looks like:

Standard analytics features

While both platforms allow users to operate on unsampled data, Piwik PRO lets their high-traffic clients employ data sampling on request. This means that even clients whose websites experience over a billion actions per month can enjoy fast and smooth access to their data.

Other product characteristics worth mentioning in this context are:

• Availability of a unique visitor metric. In Matomo, you can use it only for selected reports and for websites with low traffic. Also, the metric can’t be applied to custom date ranges.
• Number of custom dimensions. In the case of the free Matomo On-Premise, there are 5 by default and more if you manually extend the schema database. In Matomo Cloud, the upper limit is 15. At the same time, with Piwik PRO Core and Enterprise you get 25 custom dimensions. The Enterprise plan users can also count on a dedicated account manager who will help you set up additional dimensions.
• Number of websites. It’s unlimited in Piwik PRO Enterprise and Matomo On-Premise. Piwik PRO Core allows for tracking up to 10 websites, while Matomo Cloud maxes out at 30.
• Number of segments. Matomo On-Premise allows its users to create any number of segments, but each of them has to be precalculated. That impacts the speed of report creation. Matomo Cloud’s limit is 100 segments, while Piwik PRO offers unlimited segments paired with a fast backend (we tackle this issue in the next section).
• Availability of calculated metrics. This means unique metrics you can create from existing metrics. You’ll find them in Piwik PRO, while Matomo lacks this functionality.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
No data sampling by default
Possibility to enable data sampling for high-traffic properties
Custom dimensions	5 for each scope by default, more on request	15 for each scope	25 for each scope by default	25 for each scope by default, more on request
Website performance metrics
Unique visitor metric available for different reports and time ranges
Number of websites	unlimited	30	10	unlimited
Number of segments	unlimited	100	unlimited	unlimited
Calculated metrics

ClickHouse, a column-oriented database management system power Piwik PRO’s backend. With this engine, our analytics became more scalable and efficient, even when it’s used in big analytics projects where traffic exceeds a billion actions per month. Equipped with a new engine, the module:

• Cut down pre-computing time needed to process data (you can read about it here)
  
• Made our analytics more scalable and efficient (it is now able to handle over 500 million events per month)
  
• Improved the overall usability of our product (the user interface now includes a simple drag and drop editor allowing you to mix and combine metrics, dimensions and events to create and filter reports)
  
• Increased the variety of data visualization methods (e.g. nested tables and numerous types of line and bar charts)

All of that allowed our customers to overcome some reporting limitations.

Matomo, due to its software based on PHP and a row-oriented MySQL database, needs additional time to pre-process data, especially when medium or high traffic is involved. According to the FAQ section of its website:

For example, using version 1.3 on a single core duo2 server with 3GB of ram, Matomo archiving process takes about 2 hours for 500,000 pages per day (and more than 1,000 websites).

In Piwik PRO reports based on the same (or much bigger) data sample would be generated immediately.

Data retention

Now let’s talk about data retention. With Matomo On-Premise, you can set these properties yourself, while Matomo Cloud retains user data for 6 to 24 months, depending on the plan. 

Piwik PRO gives you more flexibility. In the Enterprise plan, by default you’re granted 25 months of data retention that you can also extend if needed. The free Core plan offers 14-month data retention.

With Piwik PRO (in both Core and Enterprise plans), you can customize almost every piece of reporting, whether it’s a default report, dashboard, or a widget. Adding, removing, and editing metrics, dimensions, columns, or even whole charts takes just a few clicks. 

Each report has a Customize button as a handy way to apply changes.

Then, you can easily customize reports by filtering out traffic or using segmentation. You’ll see applied filters and segments each time you use the report, so you won’t have to set them up again. 

Most importantly, you can tailor any default report to your own preferences – add or remove KPIs according to your business case.
 
You can also adjust the time span for which data is grouped on each chart. This is crucial in uncovering seasonality and spotting trends across extended time periods like weeks, months, quarters or years.

None of this can be achieved with Matomo. It doesn’t allow you to customize default reports or to group the data on charts. 80% of default reports are missing data visualization features or charts.

	Matomo (On-Premise & Cloud)	Piwik PRO (Core & Enterprise)
Customizing default reports
Grouping data presented on charts

Flexibility of dashboards

You can tailor almost every element of Piwik PRO dashboards. Just add or remove analytics bits and pieces as needed. 

Instead of using ready-made templates, you can:

• Change the size and dimensions of each widget on the dashboard – there’s no need to stick to a 2-, 3- or 4-column layout
• Mix widgets on your dashboard in whatever order you like

Matomo’s dashboards don’t give you this flexibility. You can only choose from a few available dashboard layout templates:

You can’t add desired metrics and dimensions, and the dashboard can only consist of pre-made widgets. Also, their size and dimensions are fixed.

Individual KPI & metrics widgets

In Piwik PRO you can use individual metrics as separate widgets. This way you can build a whole dashboard using only the essential KPIs and metrics.

On top of that, you can expand each metric widget with a timeline or trend spark line that visualizes KPI changes over time. 

Matomo’s dashboards give you less flexibility. You can only use a bundled set of metrics. This means, for example, that if you want to create a widget with visitor-related data, it has to contain all the metrics concerning that subject. There’s no way of building dashboards around individual metrics and KPIs.

Also, you can add trend spark lines only as a part of a widget consisting of many other metrics.

Segmenting & filtering metrics

With Piwik PRO you can attach a filter or segment to each of the metrics from the dashboard. 

Also, you can narrow down the displayed KPIs to a certain audience or filter out traffic for which a given KPI should be visible. Just attach a filter or segment to each metric and it’s done.

You can’t do those things with Matomo. Using their tools, you can only apply segments to a whole dashboard, not its individual parts such as widgets or metrics. This means, for example, that your dashboard can’t include widgets based on two different segments. And each time you refresh the dashboard, the segments will disappear and you will have to configure them again.  

Widget types, charts & diagrams

Now for data visualization features. In Piwik PRO, you can choose from six different types – flat table, explorer, bar chart, line chart, user flow and funnels.

Also, what’s particularly helpful, you can build custom charts for your dashboards using metrics and dimensions of your choosing.

And you can build custom tables using whatever composition of metrics and dimensions you like.

In Matomo, there is no way to create your own custom table and then add it to the dashboard. Also, you can’t present a specific piece of data in the form of a chart or diagram – all these things are already preconfigured.

There are also important differences concerning funnel and user flow reports:

Funnel analytics

In Piwik PRO, you can build funnels out of any type of page view and custom event. In addition, funnels are:

• Retroactive – present historical data tracked before the funnel was defined
• Available immediately after creation
• Flexible – don’t require a goal as a last step
• Filtrable – allow you to define each step in the funnel at a highly granular level

No matter when you decide to configure your funnel, you’ll always have access to the full dataset of both historical and recent user actions.

Matomo’s funnels are a paid plugin, available as a standard feature in the Cloud pricing plans. They:

• Can be based on only page URLs
• Require you to set up goals
• Can’t show historical data by default (to enable it you have to validate the historical data, and then re-process the reports for all your websites)
• Need additional time to calculate the data (because of its backend efficiency)

User flow reporting

Piwik PRO’s user flow reports provide you with the following options:

• To set up a user flow report for interactions such as a page view, download, search, custom event, and more
• To see a breakdown of dimensions related to sessions. For example, you can view channels, referrers or campaigns
• To add up to five previous and next interactions

The user flow in Piwik PRO has three settings that help you analyze visitor paths:

• Standard: shows you the next interactions after the key interaction.
• Transition: illustrates the interactions before and after the key interaction.
• Reverse: shows you the interactions preceding the key interaction.

As for Matomo, users flow is a paid plugin, available in the Marketplace as a yearly subscription and as a part of the Matomo Cloud offer. It allows you to take advantage of one type of report (standard user flow), based only on page views.

Multi-channel attribution

Both Piwik PRO and Matomo give multi-channel attribution tools that help you analyze the customer journey and assign conversions to the right channel. 

However, with Matomo those tools are available only as a paid plugin. Also, the platform doesn’t allow you to create custom attribution models and custom attribution reports or use custom channel grouping in the reports visualizing conversion paths. 

All of that is available in Piwik PRO.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enrerprise
Funnel analytics	paid plugin /
User flow	paid plugin /
Line chart
Explorer
Bar chart
Flat table
Custom dashboards
Custom reports	paid plugin /
Ability to customize any default report
Ability to create custom visualization
Filtering data
Custom metrics & dimensions for each report
Custom data grouping
Advanced drag & drop editor
Custom data filters & segments to each widget
Custom attribution models
Custom attribution reports
Custom channel grouping in conversion path reports
Path length report
Time to conversion report
Attribution model comparison tool	paid plugin

Piwik PRO gives you with three types of charts – line, pie and column – that you can turn into:

• Clustered column charts – showing values of multiple category groups
• Grouped bar charts – letting you compare values of multiple categories across multiple dimensions
• Stacked bar charts – visualizing traffic composition depending on the device type used by the user – in other words putting the whole custom report into a single chart
• Multi-line charts – especially useful for comparing data from specific time periods and values over time

For even greater flexibility, you can integrate Piwik PRO with data visualization tools – such as Tableau, Power BI or BigQuery.

Matomo Analytics provides you with a set of visualizations consisting of: tables, nested tables, line charts, multi-line charts, bar graphs, pie charts, and cloud charts. And with Matomo Custom Reports you’ll get to choose between other graph types such as:

• Table: showing the report data in a typical Matomo (Piwik) data table
• Evolution: a graph showing the evolution for the selected metrics over time (also known as a line graph)
• Plus, the visualizations from standard Matomo analytics

	Matomo Analytics	Matomo Custom Reports Plugin	Piwik PRO (Core & Enterprise)
Tables
Nested tables
Line charts
Multi-line charts
Bar graphs
Pie chart
Cloud chart
Clustered column charts
Grouped bar charts
Stacked bar chart
Customizable graph templates
Easy integrations with BI tools (e.g. Tableau, Looker Studio, Power BI)	*	**

*only a manual integration with Looker Studio available
**Looker Studio available only via a third-party tool

In Matomo, there is an open plugin called Marketing Campaigns Reporting. It allows you to see the following data:

The most important dimension for traffic reporting – source/medium – is available only for campaign reports. You won’t be able to use it in reports on traffic from particular browsers or websites – also important for examining your traffic sources.

In Piwik PRO, you can create a report with your own set of metrics and dimensions, so adding a source/medium dimension to the above-mentioned reports (or virtually any other report) won’t be any problem:

Also quite helpful: the report can be enriched with a multi-line chart showing you the effectiveness of traffic sources over time. Thanks to the fact that the table can be nested, the information is easy to arrange in a user-friendly manner.

For instance, if you click on Campaigns dimension, you’ll see the following data:

The metrics and dimensions visible in the report can be matched to your personal preferences.

In Piwik PRO (in both Core and Enterprise plans), you can take advantage of default performance-related reports or create custom reports based on dedicated metrics. Here’s a list of the key metrics for understanding page load speed:

• Page generation time
• Time until DOM is ready
• Time to interact
• Time of redirections
• Domain lookup time
• Server connection time
• Server response time
• Page rendering time

And here is a sample report based on those metrics:

As for Matomo, right now it offers one performance-related metric called average generation time. However, it doesn’t present how fast the website loads for different connection qualities or devices. The metric refers only to the communication time between the browser and the page server.

In Piwik PRO there’s a time to interact metric that shows how different users experience website loading speed.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Page generation time
Time until DOM is ready
Time to interact
Time of redirections
Domain lookup time
Server connection time
Server response time
Page rendering time

Tracking mobile apps is different from collecting data about websites. It calls for specialized tools, as well as employing software development kits (SDKs). 

With Piwik PRO and Matomo, you may take advantage of the mobile SDK (iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native) to analyze user engagement and ensure a smooth experience with your app.

The SDKs of both platforms let you track screen views, events, searches made within your app search engine, custom dimensions, user ID, goals, and ecommerce interactions. But there are some differences.

Significant differences between Matomo and Piwik Pro SDKs:

1. There are no data anonymization options in Matomo (such as anonymous tracking or opt-out).
2. Matomo SDKs offer only session-scoped custom dimensions (no event-scoped dimensions).
3. Piwik PRO has better support for acquisition reports than Matomo, including campaign attribution and support for deep links (links that lead to the app from a website).
4. Matomo SDKs don’t support content tracking (content impressions and content interactions). It is possible with Piwik PRO to track the ad impressions in your application and get insights into how your audience watches your videos and listens to your audio.
5. With Piwik PRO, you can track search engine keywords and how they’re used in search inside your application. This feature is not available in Matomo.
6. Matomo’s documentation concerning SDKs is often insufficient and confusing, like here.
7. Matomo’s iOS and Android SDKs differ since they were developed separately. You have to put a lot of effort into implementing both.

Single-page websites and progressive web apps have become a standard over the last few years. Getting their tracking right is crucial to your success, as you must ensure the measured data is meaningful and correct. Both Piwik PRO and Matomo offer these functionalities.

You can set up accelerated mobile pages (AMP) with Piwik PRO. It is an open-source framework designed to optimize browsing on mobile devices. This technology can render static content pages much faster than traditional methods. Matomo lacks this feature.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Android – Java
Android – Kotlin
iOS – Swift
iOS – Objective-C
Flutter
React Native
SPA – Single Page Application
PWA – Progressive Web Apps
AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
Data anonymization
Content tracking
Search engine keywords
Rich documentation
Ease of implementation

With Piwik PRO, you can fully integrate your analytics with the data from Google Search Console, namely:

• Impressions – for keywords searched on Google
• Clicks – for keywords
• CTR – ratio between impression and click for keywords
• Average position of the keyword in Google search results for a given time period

This will allow you to enhance your data collection with new data points that help you assess your performance in search results. You can apply Google Search Console metrics to your dashboards and segments in custom and default reports. Also, you can segment every data bit from GSC reports by using the wide range of dimensions available in Piwik PRO.

Matomo’s Google Search Console integration works quite differently. You only see a preview of GSC data displayed in the Matomo interface. 

What’s more, you can’t:

• Combine GSC metrics with analytics dimensions and metrics
• Link keyword data with behavioral metrics like bounce rate or conversion rate 
• Apply segments to GSC reports and GSC data

This means that you won’t use Google Search Console data in custom combinations with any other analytics dimensions and metrics.

	Matomo (On‑Premise & Cloud)	Piwik PRO (Core & Enterprise)
Google Search Console Integration
Segmenting GSC data
Using GSC data in other reports
Mixing keyword data and behavioral data

Google Ads integration

Another key integration is with Google Ads. 

In the case of Piwik PRO, the Google Ads report encompasses the following set of metrics:

• Clicks (fetched from Google Ads)
• Cost (fetched from Google Ads)
• Average cost per click –  CPC (fetched from Google Ads)
• Click-through rate – CTR (fetched from Google Ads)
• Sessions
• Bounce rate
• Return on ad spend – ROAS 
• Goal conversions (for a specific goal or all goals)
• Goal conversion rate (for a specific goal or all goals)
• Sum of goal revenue (for a specific goal or all goals)

These are the default metrics, and you can add any number of additional metrics available in Piwik PRO (e.g. ads impressions) by creating a custom report. On top of that, you can combine Google Ads metrics with behavioral data or segment them using dimensions of your choice.

The report is divided into eight sub-reports that let you track:

• Google Ads accounts: Tells you about accounts connected to your website. 
• Campaigns: Tells you which campaigns bring traffic to your website.
• Ads: Tells you which ads bring traffic to your website.
• Ad groups: Tells you which ad groups bring traffic to your website.
• Keywords: Tells you which keywords are used to display ads.
• Landing pages: Tells you about URLs to which visitors were sent from ads or keywords on Google Ads.
• Performance by day of week: Tells you how much traffic your ads generate each day of the week.
• Ad distribution networks: Tells you in which network your ad was displayed (i.e. search, search partners or Google Display Network).

With Matomo, data related to Google Ads is available in the campaigns report. The information you’ll find there is limited to:

• Campaign name
• Number of visits
• Unique visitors
• Actions
• Actions per visit
• Average time on the website
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rates for different goals on your website

If that’s not enough for you, a paid plugin Advertising Conversion Export lets you import additional data from your Google Ad account. The information will be arranged into seven sub-reports:

• Google Ad account
• Campaigns
• Devices
• Networks
• Keywords
• Search queries
• Click performance (displayed in a report listing all clicks)

However, outside the plugin, data can be used only for the Visitor log & profile and Goal reports. You can’t freely mix and match the information from Google Ads with different metrics and dimensions or use it in custom reports. 

Both Piwik PRO and Matomo have free plans, so for each there is a huge open knowledge base including documentation, help center materials and community forums.

Piwik PRO Enterprise offers the following to all clients:

A dedicated account manager – assists you in defining your business needs and translating them into actionable advice for using the platform.

Detailed documentation – provides detailed infrastructure guidelines to ensure optimal product performance in the case of an on-premises installation.

Dedicated technical support – to give you a first point of contact in case of emergencies or web analytics performance issues.

Custom integration and development (extra service) – to integrate PPAS with every product in your data ecosystem (e.g., CRMs or BI tools) and adopt the platform to your needs through custom development.

Analytics consulting (extra service) – to advise you on what to change in your tracking and reporting bringing you closer to your business objectives.

On-demand custom training and workshops (extra service) – to let you learn the skills required to use analytics insights in your day-to-day work. Every training is unique, because we tailor them to the use cases of particular teams and stakeholders.

24/7 monitoring and incident handling – to make sure your platform is up and running and performing well.

Piwik PRO provides those services during both American and European business hours. Guaranteed response time for the top-level plan is four business hours.

As for paid versions of Matomo, depending on the plan (Essential, Business, Enterprise or extra support for Matomo on-premise), you’ll get:

• Email-based support
• User guides
• Community support (a forum)
• A dedicated account manager
• An onboarding questionnaire and a meeting with a Matomo support team member

With the highest plan, the response time of Matomo’s support team is one business day.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Email support
User guides
Community forum
Dedicated account manager
Dedicated service delivery manager
Personalized implementation & onboarding
Dedicated training (on-site or remotely)
Analytics consulting
Custom development & integrations
24/7 monitoring and incident handling
Support response time		avg. 1 business day		4 hours
Support team’s business hours		New Zealand (GMT+13)		Europe (GMT+1) and US Eastern Time (GMT-5)

GDPR

We take pride in the fact that our product has been audited and found compliant by a top global consulting firm. Our platform not only meets the privacy standards laid out in GDPR but helps organizations fulfill their obligations arising from the regulation.

One of the most important of these obligations is that every website owner should collect informed, active, unambiguous and granular consents before they start tracking personal data.

Below, we describe how these responsibilities are addressed by Matomo and Piwik PRO.

Gathering consents & data subject requests

With Matomo, you’ll have to implement the code of the privacy notice mechanism into your website, following the instructions provided by the team. In practice, you’ll need to have developer-like skills to manage the task.

Piwik PRO lets you take advantage of a Consent Manager. It’s a dedicated tool for collecting and managing visitor consent and data subject requests.

You’ll be able to configure everything without touching a piece of code and see the most important statistics regarding user consents and data subject requests:

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO (Core & Enterprise)
Customizable consent forms (modal & pop-up)
User-friendly consent form editor
Support for custom HTML consent form
Collecting consents for the use of third-party tools
Displaying consent requests for certain regions (e.g. EEA)
Consent reminder widget
Consent management widget
Data subject request widget
Data subject request admin panel
Data subject request history
Consent performance statistics
Zero cookie load

HIPAA

Matomo assures HIPAA compliance only when the client keeps the data on their own infrastructure. Piwik PRO Enterprise, in turn, allows for collecting and storing data in line with the law in the on-premises, public and private cloud hosting plans.

Piwik PRO Core is as secure and privacy-friendly as the paid plan for the platform. However, since it uses servers located in the EU, it doesn’t satisfy the demands of HIPAA.

Data residency laws

Numerous countries, such as Germany, Australia, Canada, India, Switzerland, Russia and China, have introduced laws that order companies to keep their residents’ personal data within the country’s physical borders.

Considering Matomo, you will be able to meet these obligations if you decide to host your data on-premises. For Germany, you can also use the Matomo Cloud, because that’s where its cloud servers are located.

Piwik PRO gives you a greater variety of options. You can:

• Keep the data in your own cloud subscription within one of our certified providers – Azure, Orange Cloud and Elastx.
• Choose one of our cloud data centers in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Germany, Hong Kong and the US.
• Use one of Azure cloud servers in 60+ locations around the world, a European-owned Orange Cloud data center in France or Elastx in Sweden. 

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Full control over data
GDPR compliance
HIPAA compliance	depends on your infrastructure
Cloud server location		Germany	EU data center	selected data center: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Hong Kong or the US
Private cloud server location				60+ Azure regions, and European-owned Orange Cloud in France and Elastx in Sweden
On-premises data residency	depends on your server location			your own cloud subscription with one of our certified providers available in 60+ Azure regions, and European-owned Orange Cloud in France and Elastx in Sweden

Anonymizing data

Another way of maintaining high privacy standards is to erase personal data from your databases. 

On Matomo’s website you’ll find information that its platform allows you to:

• Anonymize previously tracked raw data – like visitors/visits
• Anonymize visitor IP addresses
• Anonymize geolocation information (country, region, city)
• Pseudonymize user IDs (if you don’t want this data to land on your Matomo server, the solution is simply to not set the user ID. Then Matomo will use normal anonymized IDs)
• Data can also be anonymized before it’s even sent to Matomo

It’s worth noting that if you choose to anonymize the data after collecting it, you still need to obtain visitors’ consents and fulfill other obligations involved in dealing with personal data. This approach defeats the purpose of anonymizing the data and is incompatible with GDPR’s data protection by default principle.

But since pseudonymous data is still considered personal information, you have to collect valid consents to process it in line with GDPR and other privacy laws (e.g. LGPD). Matomo acknowledges this in a different section of its site:

User ID: when you enable this option, the User ID will be replaced by a pseudonym to avoid directly storing and displaying personally identifiable information such as an email address. In technical terms: given your User ID, Matomo will process the User ID pseudonym using a salted hash function. Note: replacing with a pseudonym is not the same as anonymisation. In GDPR terms: the User ID pseudonym still counts as personal data. The original User ID could still be identified if certain additional information is available (which only Matomo and your data processor has access to).

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite offers three methods for tracking web, intranet and app events without collecting personal data.

1) Anonymous data tracking with cookies and session data, in which:

• Browser fingerprint recognition is deactivated.
• The geolocation is based on anonymized IP addresses or is deactivated.
• A session identifier is set (session cookie). 
• No personal data is tracked and stored in the database without explicit consent.
• Visitors who don’t consent appear as one-time visitors and can’t be identified across sessions.
• If the visitor consents to tracking within the session, all the collected data will be added to their profile. If you enable Piwik PRO’s CDP module, the platform creates a profile connecting additional data to mold a single customer view. This gives you the ability to retarget a specific segment of your customers.

2) Anonymous data tracking without cookies, but with session data, in which:

• Browser fingerprint recognition is deactivated.
• The geolocation is based on anonymized IP addresses or is deactivated.
• A session identifier is set. 
• No personal data is tracked and stored in the database without explicit consent.
• Visitors who don’t consent appear as one-time visitors and can’t be identified across sessions.
• If the visitor consents to tracking within the session, all the collected data will be added to their profile. If you enable Piwik PRO’s CDP module, the platform creates a profile connecting additional data to mold a Single Customer View. This gives you the ability to retarget a specific segment of your customers.

3) Anonymous data tracking without cookies or session data, in which:

• Browser fingerprint recognition is deactivated
• The geolocation is based on anonymized IP addresses or is deactivated
• Session identifier and visitor recognition are deactivated
• No visitor data is saved and every event is recorded separately. Essentially, your instance doesn’t record sessions

All are what we consider to be part of a privacy-friendly approach to analytics. To learn more about their advantages and disadvantages, read this complete guide to the most popular tracking methods used in analytics software: 6 ways analytics software collects data online – plus a comparison of 5 popular platforms.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Anonymization techniques
Linking personal & anonymous data about visitors who provide consent later in a session

In Piwik PRO, we make sure that our commitment to data security is demonstrated by our partnerships and by external audits of our company and product. 

Below we describe the most important of them.

Secure infrastructure

You can deploy Piwik PRO on your own infrastructure, in a private cloud, at a third-party data center or on our secure servers. As a security-conscious provider, we exclusively partner with select Microsoft Azure data centers. We can offer our customers an infrastructure that is:

• ISO 27001 certified 
• SOC 2 certified
• GDPR-compliant
• Fully redundant
• Ensures 99% SLA

Company ISO 27001 certification

Another expression of our approach to data security is ISO 27001 certification. It confirms that Piwik PRO, as a company dedicated to data protection, acts in line with the strictest data safety policies. The scope of the safeguards covers all information processed in Piwik PRO, in every form and in every place where we operate.

External security audit

As for the safety of our product, Piwik PRO Analytics Suite has successfully passed an audit from LogicalTrust, an experienced and impartial auditor that specializes in IT security. The audit aimed to uncover any potential vulnerabilities and deficiencies of our platform, with the focus on a third-party attempt to break the system’s security. 

Thanks to the certifications and partnerships we’ve detailed above, institutions that handle sensitive information, such as banks or healthcare organizations, no longer need to conduct their own compliance assessment when buying our products.

With Matomo, companies from these sectors will still have to carry out their own audits to assess whether the level of data security provided by the platform and company is sufficient in their case.

Data security features

Let’s not forget about dedicated data security features. SAML integration and password policy are paid plugins in Matomo On-Premise and a part of the highest pricing plan in the case of Matomo Cloud. Piwik PRO provides both functionalities out of the box in the Enterprise plan. 

While both products support user management, Piwik PRO allows you to also grant permissions and roles to each module of the platform at group level. This is especially useful for those with many analytics users across different teams, subdivisions or locations.

	Matomo On‑Premise (free)	Matomo Cloud	Piwik PRO Core (free)	Piwik PRO Enterprise
Full server redundancy	depends on your infrastructure
ISO 27001 certified datacenters	depends on your infrastructure
SOC 2 certified datacenters	depends on your infrastructure
Company’s security certificates	none	none	ISO 27001	ISO 27001
External security audits	last in 2014	last in 2014	yearly	yearly
SAML integration	paid plugin
User management
User group management

The differences between the products offered by Piwik PRO and Matomo are significant. The most important of them are:

• The number of modules and use cases supported by each product 
• The scalability of the platforms and speed at which they generate reports for medium- and high-traffic websites
• The number of options for visualizing, manipulating and comparing data
• The availability of SLAs, onboarding and maintenance
• The approach to data security and privacy, including GDPR requirements

We believe that Matomo will be a great fit for small analytics projects at companies with a fairly high level of analytical and coding knowledge. 

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite, due to its advanced functionalities and efficiency, is better suited for those who want more technical support for projects of any size and for those that demand higher performance and better stability.

If you still feel like you need some more answers or simply want to get to know our platform better – feel free to create your free Piwik PRO Core account or contact us. Our team will gladly put together a personalized product demo for you.

This comparison is based on the publicly available information gathered in November 2022.