Piwik is now called Matomo
After ten years, the open source software Piwik was renamed Matomo. According to the announcement of 9 January 2018, it was running on more than one million websites at the time. One reason the Matomo team gave was that the name should no longer be shared with other businesses. The software, features and licence stayed the same, and Matomo is still free.
You can run Matomo on your own server, in which case all data stays with you. A hosted version is also available. If a guide or plugin still says “Piwik”, it usually means Matomo.
What is Piwik PRO?
Piwik PRO is an analytics suite from a separate company. According to Piwik PRO, it consists of four modules:
- Analytics: analyse visits, events, e-commerce and the customer journey, without sampling according to the provider
- Tag Manager: deploy tracking codes and third-party tags without changing the source code each time
- Data Activation: build visitor profiles and use them for personalisation or advertising
- Consent Manager: collect consent and pass it on to Analytics and Tag Manager, based on the Cookie Information consent management platform
If visitors decline cookies, Piwik PRO says it can continue measuring anonymously. Whether that is permitted on your website without consent is something to clarify with your data protection adviser. We use Piwik PRO on rheinwunder.com ourselves and control it via Google Tag Manager with consent.
Piwik PRO prices and plans
According to the pricing page (as of November 2026), there are two tiers:
- Business: from €36 a month, up to 2 million actions a month across up to 20 domains, 25 months of data retention, hosting in Sweden. You can try it free for 30 days without a credit card.
- Enterprise: from €366 a month billed annually, for large data volumes, with further hosting options in the EU, the US or a private cloud and with technical support.
An action is any tracked activity, such as a page view, a download or a click on an external link. A website with 50,000 page views and 10,000 other events a month therefore uses around 60,000 actions.
Piwik PRO, Matomo and Google Analytics 4 compared
| Piwik PRO | Matomo | Google Analytics 4 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origin | commercial product | open source, formerly Piwik | |
| Cost | from €36 a month | free on your own server | standard version free |
| Data storage | cloud in Sweden, further options in Enterprise | your own server or Matomo Cloud | Google servers |
| Tag manager | included | included | separate (Google Tag Manager) |
| Consent management | included | separate solution needed | separate solution needed |
The three tools measure similar metrics. They differ mainly in where the data is stored, what they cost and how much you have to set up yourself. You can read more about the individual tools under analytics and Google Analytics 4.
Who is Piwik PRO suitable for?
Piwik PRO is aimed at companies that want analytics, a tag manager and consent management from one provider and want to keep their data in the EU, for example in healthcare, the public sector or finance. If you want to measure for free and host the tool yourself, Matomo is the better choice. Teams that work a lot with Google Ads benefit from the close link between GA4 and their ad accounts.
Whatever the tool, you need a tracking concept: which events count as success, which data you may collect with consent and who analyses it. Only then is it worth choosing a tool. How this works on the server side is explained in the article on client-side vs. server-side tracking.
