2026-08-11

Matomo on Joomla: four extensions, zero reviews

Matomo is the one privacy analytics tool that does claim Joomla support. Search the extension directory and you get four results.

Every single one of them has zero reviews.

Not one review. Not a two star complaint. Nothing, across four extensions, the oldest of which has been listed since December 2018.

That number is worth sitting with for a second, because it tells you something the feature lists do not.

What is actually on the directory

As of August 2026:

Extension	Listed	Joomla	Reviews
itcs Matomo	December 2018	J4, J5, J6	0
Matomo for HikaShop	2022	J3, J4	0
netzSINN Matomo Statistics	April 2026	J5, J6	0
Matomo Analytics Live Counter	June 2026	J5, J6	0

None of them is published by Matomo. Matomo's own documentation lists Joomla as an integration but Matomo has never shipped a Joomla extension itself. These are all community work and two of the four appeared in the last four months.

If an extension hunt is not what you signed up for, a GA4 alternative that is one script tag is the shorter route.

To be fair to them: itcs Matomo does the tracking code plus the opt-out iframe, which is the correct pair of things to do and it has kept its Joomla compatibility current for seven years. That is more than most of the analytics category manages.

Zero reviews after seven years does not mean the extension is bad. It means almost nobody who installed it came back to say anything, which usually means almost nobody installed it.

The question nobody asks first

Here is where most Matomo-on-Joomla articles go wrong. They compare extensions.

The extension is the small decision. It injects a script. They all do roughly the same thing and any of them will work.

The big decision is the one underneath: who runs Matomo?

Because Matomo comes in two completely different products wearing the same name and the extension you pick barely matters compared to which of those you signed up for.

Option one: Matomo Cloud

You pay Matomo to run it. Pricing starts around 26 EUR a month for 50,000 hits and scales with volume.

You get the full Matomo feature set, hosted, updated and backed up by the people who wrote it. It is a good product and the price is honest for what it is.

It is also roughly three times what the simpler tools in this category charge, because Matomo is not really competing with them. Matomo competes with Google Analytics on features. Heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, tag manager, e-commerce, custom reports and a lot more.

If you need those, nothing else on this page substitutes. If you do not, you are paying for a data team's toolkit to answer three questions.

Option two: self hosted Matomo

Free, as in the software costs nothing. This is the option people mean when they say Matomo is free.

You install PHP and MySQL, run the Matomo application and point your Joomla site at it. Now you own it.

"Everything fails all the time."

Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, at The Next Web Conference (2008)

He was talking about distributed systems. It applies just as well to the second web application you did not plan on operating.

Self hosted Matomo needs cron jobs configured properly or your reports silently stop archiving. It needs the database maintained, because raw log tables grow fast and Matomo keeps them by default. It needs security updates applied, because it is a public facing PHP application holding your visitor data. It needs backups and it needs someone to notice when the backups stop.

None of that is hard. All of it is ongoing. The question is not whether you can do it. It is whether you want a second thing to patch on the Tuesday your Joomla site also needs patching.

And the failure mode is quiet. A cron job that stops running does not send you an email. You find out when you open a report and the last six weeks are missing.

Where the traffic actually goes

One more thing that catches people out and it is not Matomo's fault.

Self hosted or cloud, Matomo sets cookies by default. You can switch to cookieless tracking in the settings and you should if that is what you came for but it is a configuration choice rather than the default. Until you make it, you still need a consent banner and you are still losing everyone who declines.

Matomo also offers a consent-free configuration that several data protection authorities have accepted. Getting there means turning off a handful of features and knowing which ones. It is documented and it is genuinely achievable. It is just not what you get by installing it.

Where StatJolt fits in

StatJolt is the smaller answer to the same question.

Cookieless is not a setting you find. It is the only mode there is. There are no cookies to disable because there are none so there is no banner to configure and no configuration to get wrong.

Nothing runs on your server. There is no second application to patch, no cron job to monitor and no database to prune. There is also nothing written to your Joomla database, which self hosted analytics extensions cannot say. The Joomla plugin writes one row of settings and never touches your tables again.

You still get Core Web Vitals, funnels, user journeys and JavaScript error reporting, included rather than sold as a tier.

What you do not get is Matomo's depth. No heatmaps, no session recordings, no tag manager, no A/B testing. If those are on your list, be honest about it and go with Matomo. That is the right call and no amount of simplicity beats a feature you actually need.

The short version

The four Matomo extensions on the Joomla directory are all fine and all interchangeable and their zero review counts say more about how few people took this path than about the code.

Decide the hosting question first. Matomo Cloud is a good product at around 26 EUR a month. Self hosted Matomo is free software with an operations bill you pay in attention rather than money.

And if you picked Matomo mainly to escape Google, check what you are actually escaping to. A privacy tool that needs a banner until you configure it out of needing one has solved less of your problem than you think.

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