With recent GA4 migration, my friends are exploring better ways to integrate various essential website scripts(e.g. product analytics, crash reporting, advertising, customer engagement, etc.). Google Tag Manager (GTM) is one solution.
RudderStack is a mature Open-Source alternative to GTM that can be self-hosted and has similar functionality i.e. load various product scripts without changing code and send events to desired destinations
Top 5 reasons to replace GTM with RudderStack
- You get full-control of your customer data while making the site/app load faster as you don’t have to load multiple scripts
- As you can load and manage scripts via a central dashboard, it becomes easy, quick, and less error prone to replace any particular script with its alternative e.g. replacing Google Analytics (GA) with GA4 or Mixpanel
- It is OSS and not owned by Google
- Tranformations: Transform the events(using your own JS/python code) the way you want before reaching the destination e.g. remove personally identifiable information, enrich event data with some 3rd party information
- Can send customer data from website and mobile apps(using RudderStack SDKs) to warehouses(Postgres, S3, Redshift, Sbowflake, Bigquery, etc.) and 200+ destinations
More details on GitHub repository - https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server
Ask me anything
This seems quite similar to Segment’s offering. Matomo (formerly Piwik) have a self hosted tag management system that could be slightly closer to Google Tag Manager configuration for anyone who is looking for a like for like replacement.
They also have a mature and self hosted analytics package too.
Yes, RudderStack has all Segment fratures and a good replacement of the same. I never knew if Matomo has GTM functionality, I thought it is more like Google Analytics.
Yeah exactly that 👍 It’s a self hosted web analytics platform but also has Tag Management available via a first party plugin. It is very comparable to GTM and if you have some frontend JavaScript knowledge it has everything you’d reasonably need I think.