Witnes vs Swetrix
Two privacy-first analytics platforms with a shared mission but different areas of focus. Here's an honest look at what each one does well.
Overview
Both tools get privacy right
Swetrix is an open-source, cookieless alternative to Google Analytics built by a team in Ukraine. It offers a comprehensive feature set including traffic analytics, session replay, custom events, A/B testing, feature flags, and revenue attribution via Stripe and Paddle. It's self-hostable, actively maintained, and genuinely excellent at giving you a broad view of your audience.
Witnes started from a different question: not just who visited, but what did they actually experience? That led to a deeper focus on performance signals — beyond Core Web Vitals into request timing, animation smoothness, and per-session diagnostics — and a layer specifically built for B2B products: understanding analytics not just by visitor, but by the organisation they belong to.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Witnes | Swetrix |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics & Traffic | ||
| Pageviews & session tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Unique visitor counting | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bounce rate & session duration | ✓ | ✓ |
| Real-time dashboard | ✓ | ✓ |
| Geo analytics (country, region) | ✓ | ✓ |
| UTM & referrer tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Entry & exit pages | ✓ | ✓ |
| Performance Monitoring | ||
| Core Web Vitals (LCP, FCP, CLS) | ✓ | ✓ |
| INP (Interaction to Next Paint) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Request-to-idle timing | ✓ | — |
| Animation jank tracking | ✓ | — |
| Per-session performance breakdown | ✓ | — |
| User Intelligence | ||
| Custom events | ✓ | ✓ |
| User identification (identify()) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Per-organisation analytics (B2B orgId) | ✓ | — |
| Visitor session detail | ✓ | ✓ |
| Session replay (video) | — | ✓ |
| Conversion funnels | — | ✓ |
| Custom dashboards | — | ✓ |
| A/B testing & feature flags | — | ✓ |
| Experience Signals | ||
| Sentiment score per visit | ✓ | — |
| Bad experience detection (frontend / network / backend) | ✓ | — |
| Privacy & Compliance | ||
| Cookieless tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| No consent banner required | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR compliant | ✓ | ✓ |
| EU data residency | ✓ | ✓ |
| Platform | ||
| JavaScript tracker (<5KB) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Error tracking | ✓ | ✓ |
| Revenue tracking (Stripe / Paddle) | — | ✓ |
| Self-hostable | — | ✓ |
| Open source | — | ✓ |
| Team collaboration | ✓ | ✓ |
| API access | ✓ | ✓ |
— means not currently available. Information based on publicly available documentation.
Where Witnes shines
The layer Swetrix doesn't have
Swetrix is built around breadth — a wide feature set for traffic and experiments. Witnes is built around depth: how did the page actually feel, and which customer account was affected.
Performance beyond Core Web Vitals
Both tools track LCP, INP, and CLS — but official Web Vitals often resolve before a SPA is actually usable. Witnes also measures how long until the page was truly idle, how many animation frames dropped, and how smoothly content settled. The signals that matter for dynamic interfaces.
Sentiment Score — automatic experience classification
Instead of hunting through individual metrics, every visit in Witnes gets an automatic quality signal: good, neutral, or degraded — computed from performance, frontend errors, and network conditions together. You see the answer before you dig into the data.
Analytics by customer account, not just by visitor
Swetrix's identify() links sessions to individual users. Witnes adds a first-class
orgId layer built into the entire data pipeline. Filter sentiment,
performance, and errors by organisation. Know which customer
is struggling before they open a support ticket.
Get started
Know which customer is having a bad day — before they tell you.
Filter every metric by customer account. Sentiment scores, performance signals, and error patterns per organisation — not just per anonymous visitor.