Open-source is great. The exemption costs you the UTMs.

Not really. Without cookies Matomo falls back to config_id, a short-lived environment hash — a window of roughly 30 minutes, 24 hours at most — deliberately built not to recognise returning visitors. Pageviews, events, downloads, outlinks and site search survive intact; returning-visitor counts, visit frequency, multi-session campaign attribution and cohorts degrade. Sealmetrics is cookieless across the entire product with no toggle and no feature loss. The legal basis also differs in kind: Matomo without a banner depends on holding a consent-exempt configuration — permitted under the CNIL criteria in France, not under Germany's TDDDG §25 — while Sealmetrics writes nothing to the visitor's device and reads nothing from it, so ePrivacy Article 5(3) is not engaged in the first place.

Self-hosting is free on the licence. It is not free in operations: you need a server, security patches, backups, plugin maintenance, upgrade cycles and someone responsible when archiving breaks at 3 AM. For a serious eCommerce, that's typically 0.2–0.5 FTE — €15K–€40K/yr in real cost. Sealmetrics replaces all of that for €6K/yr, with cookieless data and a modern stack on top. If you would rather compare like for like, use Matomo Cloud: $23 / ~€29 a month covers 50,000 hits, and above 10 million hits a month it is quote-based, so at eCommerce volume you are negotiating a price rather than reading one.

Piwik PRO is a commercial fork of Matomo, with enterprise features and EU hosting layered on top. Both share the cookie-based architecture origin, and both offer a consentless configuration that trades data for compliance. Piwik PRO sells Business from €35/mo and quotes Enterprise privately, and is retiring its free Core plan on 31 March 2026; Matomo Cloud publishes its tiers. Sealmetrics differs from both at the architecture level: not a privacy-friendly configuration of cookie tracking, but cookieless capture by design — nothing to configure and nothing to keep configured.

Both are real, and for some teams they decide the choice: source code you can audit, a database you own with direct SQL access, and a suite that includes Tag Manager, heatmaps, session recording and A/B testing. Sealmetrics does none of those things and is not trying to — it is analytics only, aggregate by design, with no session recording and no individual-level data. Where the two genuinely diverge is the paid-media case: if consent rejection or the exempt configuration is costing you campaign-level attribution on a €10M+ eCommerce, no amount of ecosystem replaces the missing data.

It narrows the gap, and it is worth saying so plainly. The Commission's proposal of 19 November 2025 (COM(2025) 837) would move cookie rules into the GDPR through a new Article 88a and exempt first-party, aggregated audience measurement for the controller's own use from consent. Adopted broadly as drafted — ordinary legislative procedure, realistically 2027–2028, substantive amendments likely — a Matomo in exempt configuration would qualify across the EU rather than only in France. What does not change: that configuration still strips your campaign parameters and visit-level data, it still costs you returning-visitor recognition and multi-session attribution, a first-party endpoint still survives ad blockers that a third-party script does not, and you still run the servers. Our position has never depended on the banner alone.

Yes. Run both in parallel 30 days. If your Matomo runs a consent banner, compare traffic counts first — the gap is your consent rejection rate, and Sealmetrics typically captures 30–70% more EU traffic. If it runs the consent-exempt configuration, traffic counts will be much closer, so compare campaign and channel attribution instead, because that is where the exempt configuration is blank. Then compare revenue alignment against your backend. Most teams decide within the first 14 days.