Piwik, Matomo, Piwik PRO — What’s the Difference?

Update time: June 23, 2025

If you’ve been shopping around for a Google Analytics alternative, you’ve probably come across three names that seem to be related but aren’t quite the same thing: Piwik, Piwik PRO, and Matomo. It’s confusing, I know. They all share the same origin story, but today they’re three very different products run by different companies.

Let’s untangle this mess.

The Short Version

Here’s the quick answer in case you just need the headline:

Matomo is the open-source, community-driven successor to the original Piwik project. Piwik PRO is a separate, commercially operated product built on the same foundation — but it’s not open source. Both trace back to the same original Piwik codebase, but they split years ago and went in very different directions.

Now let’s dive into the full story.

Piwik: Where It All Started

Back in 2007, a developer named Matthieu Aubry released Piwik — an open-source web analytics platform built on PHP and MySQL. At the time, Google Analytics was already dominant, but it had a big drawback: you were sending all your visitor data to Google. Piwik was the answer if you wanted to keep your data on your own servers.

It grew fast. For years, Piwik was the go-to self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. If you wanted full control over your analytics data and didn’t want to pay a subscription, Piwik was the obvious choice.

But then things got complicated.

The Fork: Matomo vs Piwik PRO

In September 2013, Matthieu Aubry teamed up with Maciej Zawadziński, the CEO of a Polish development agency called Clearcode, to launch Piwik PRO — a company that would provide commercial support and services around the open-source Piwik project.

Fast forward to June 2016. Clearcode bought out Matthieu Aubry’s shares and became the sole owner of Piwik PRO. Around the same time, they started building their own analytics product based on the Piwik codebase — but this time, it wouldn’t be open source.

Meanwhile, the original open-source Piwik project needed to distinguish itself from the new commercial fork. So in January 2018, the open-source project officially changed its name to Matomo.

Long story short: Matomo is the open-source continuation of Piwik. Piwik PRO is a commercial product built on the same roots.

Matomo: Open Source, Community-Driven

Matomo stayed true to what Piwik was originally about. It’s fully open source, you can download it and install it on your own server for free, and the community contributes to its development.

Matomo also introduced some paid features over time — for example, cloud-hosted plans if you don’t want to manage your own server. But the core product remains free and self-hostable.

As of July 2022, over one million websites use Matomo, accounting for more than 2% of all known traffic analysis tool websites and 6% of the top 10,000 websites worldwide. (Source: Wikipedia)

Not bad for an open-source underdog.

Piwik Pro

Piwik PRO took a different path. It’s a closed-source, commercially operated product. In 2017, Piwik PRO raised $2 million in Series A funding, and it’s been growing as a serious enterprise alternative to Google Analytics ever since.

Piwik PRO comes in two versions:

• Piwik PRO Core — a free, SaaS version hosted in a data center in Germany. The monthly event limit is 5 million. One thing to keep in mind: the data center is overseas, so if your target audience is in China, it might not be the best fit.
• Piwik PRO Enterprise — a paid version available as SaaS or as a private deployment. The private version supports Azure, and for users in China, you’d need the Azure Chinese data center option.

Piwik PRO has become popular largely because of its privacy-first positioning. It’s designed to help companies comply with GDPR and other privacy regulations without relying on Google’s infrastructure.

Quick Comparison

Final Words

If you landed on this page because you’re trying to replace Google Analytics, you now have a clearer picture of the landscape. Matomo is the open-source, self-hostable option that gives you full control. Piwik PRO is the commercial, enterprise-focused product that prioritizes privacy compliance out of the box.