What it is

Open Web Analytics is an open source web analytics server written in PHP and released under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later. It ships the OWA Server together with a first party JavaScript tracking client that can be added to web pages, and it is positioned by its maintainers as an alternative to commercial analytics tools such as Google Analytics. The project lives in the PHP ecosystem and is distributed through its GitHub repository, with a WordPress integration plugin and a PHP SDK maintained alongside it for sites and applications that want tracking wired in without hand-rolling the client.

The concrete problem it solves is data ownership. Commercial analytics products collect visitor behaviour on infrastructure the site owner does not control, and the resulting data is subject to the vendor's terms, retention rules and access model. Open Web Analytics installs on the operator's own server, so the traffic data, session recordings and reports stay on hardware the operator manages. A single instance of the OWA Server can track an unlimited number of websites, which means one deployment can serve an agency or a portfolio of properties rather than one installation per site.

Key capabilities

• Tracks visitors, pageviews, e-commerce transactions and configurable actions.
• Tracks an unlimited number of websites from a single OWA Server instance.
• Provides a first party JavaScript tracker client for embedding in web pages.
• Includes a reporting dashboard and portal where all reports can be viewed and customized.
• Generates heatmaps and "Domstream" session recordings.
• Performs geolocation of visitors.
• Exposes a REST API for administration and data access, with a multi-user reporting interface and an extensible framework for custom modules.

Who uses it and how

• Site owners who want analytics data to remain on their own infrastructure instead of a commercial vendor's.
• WordPress operators, who add tracking through the OWA integration plugin rather than editing templates directly.
• PHP application developers, who integrate tracking through the OWA PHP SDK.
• Agencies or multi-site operators, who run one OWA Server instance and track many websites from it.
• Administrators and analysts, who use the multi-user reporting interface and REST API to distribute access and pull data programmatically.

Getting started

The README points to a technical requirements page and a step by step installation guide in the project wiki. Development builds require Composer for PHP dependencies and Node.js with npm for the JavaScript build, run as composer install followed by npm install && npm run build.

When to use it — and when not to

It fits operators who want a self-hosted replacement for commercial analytics and are willing to run the OWA Server themselves, including building the front-end assets, since vendor/ and the built public/ tree are not tracked in git and must be produced after cloning. The repository shows 115 open issues and no listed contributors, and the README warns that issue tickets without the necessary debug information are closed automatically, so support expectations should be modest. Anyone needing a managed service or a vendor-backed SLA should look elsewhere, because no hosted option is offered here.