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Virling vs Matomo: a Matomo alternative for revenue

Matomo is a full open-source web analytics suite. Virling does one job: it reads your payments and joins each one to the visit before it, so you see which channels bring customers who pay and stay.

	Virling	Matomo
Open source	Yes, AGPLv3	Yes, GPLv3
Self-host	Yes, one Rust binary with embedded storage. No Postgres, ClickHouse or Redis.	Yes. Matomo 6 needs a web server, PHP 8.1 or newer, and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer
Revenue	Read from Stripe, Paddle, Shopify, WooCommerce, Dodo Payments, Polar, LemonSqueezy, Creem or RevenueCat with a key, no event code	Ecommerce orders sent from your site's tracking code or server-side tracking
Retention by first-payment channel	Yes. Customers are grouped by the channel of their first payment, and renewals keep it	See their docs
AI assistant visits	Yes. AI assistants are their own channel, with revenue	Yes. An AI Assistants channel, from referrer data
AI crawler fetches	Yes. Pages each AI company's bots read; every fetch once you add the server snippet	Yes, for AI chatbots that fetch pages to answer someone, through a server-side integration such as Cloudflare or CloudFront. Training and indexing crawlers are excluded
AI answers tracking	Yes. Your buyer questions asked to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini every week. Paid hosted plans, or your own keys when self-hosting	Not covered in their AI Assistants docs
MCP server	Yes, read-only	Yes. A free MCP Server plugin for Matomo On-Premise 5.8 and later
Price	Free to self-host. Hosted: $19 a month, or $79 a month for agencies. Every hosted plan starts with a 14-day free trial.	On-Premise Community edition is free. Cloud starts at 29 a month for 50,000 hits, excluding tax

Based on Matomo's public docs and pricing, checked on 1 November 2026: requirements, pricing, ecommerce, AI assistants, MCP Server plugin, license. See their site for current features and pricing. Something out of date? Tell us.

When Matomo is the better fit

You want a broad, GPL-licensed web analytics suite on a PHP and MySQL stack you already run, with AI assistant reports and an MCP plugin, and you are happy to send ecommerce orders from your own tracking code.

When Virling is the better fit

You sell a product or subscription and want payments read straight from your provider, joined to the visit before them, with retention by first-payment channel and a weekly check of whether AI assistants name you. All in one binary with no database server.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an open-source Matomo alternative for revenue attribution?

Yes. Virling is open source under AGPLv3. It reads payments from Stripe, Paddle, Shopify, WooCommerce, Dodo Payments, Polar, LemonSqueezy, Creem or RevenueCat and credits each one to the visit before it, with no ecommerce tracking code.

What does it take to self-host Matomo and Virling?

Matomo 6 needs a web server, PHP 8.1 or newer and MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.6 or newer. Virling is one Rust binary with embedded storage.

When is Matomo the better fit?

When you want a broad web analytics suite on a PHP and MySQL stack you already run, and you are happy to send ecommerce orders from your own code.

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