Kantan Analytics – Cookieless Self-Hosted Analytics & Heatmaps

Kantan Analytics is a self-hosted WordPress analytics plugin that tracks visitors, sessions, journeys, and conversions — without cookies, external services, or data ever leaving your server. A private, self-hosted Google Analytics alternative: every metric lives in your own database. You own it.

Kantan keeps every metric in your own database and answers the questions you actually have: which pages convert, where visitors come from, who keeps coming back, and what changed this week. The dashboard installs in a few minutes and runs in the WordPress admin sidebar you already use.

Privacy by architecture

• No cookies. Browser localStorage only — no consent banner required in most jurisdictions, no cross-site tracking possible.
• No IP storage. The visitor’s country is resolved from a bundled offline database at tracking time (region is optional — bring your own city database); the raw IP is used only for that lookup plus the exclusion/rate-limit checks, and is never written to disk.
• Nothing phoned home. Every metric stays in your WordPress database and Kantan never sends your data to us. One optional integration — the Attribution Webhook, off by default — can forward conversions to a webhook URL you choose (e.g. your own CRM); see the Privacy section.
• Configurable retention. Raw session detail purges on the schedule you set (default 90 days). Daily aggregates live in a local SQLite file forever.
• Bots and admins filtered. Logged-in admins, common bots, and IPs you specify are excluded before anything is recorded — your numbers reflect actual humans.

What it tracks

• Sessions, pageviews, bounce, duration — trended across any date range, with device, browser, OS, and screen-resolution breakdowns
• Traffic sources & UTM tracking — organic, direct, referral, social, paid; UTM parameters captured on first touch and attached to every conversion in the session
• Click, scroll, rage-click & dead-click heatmaps — drawn over a live preview of every page, per-device, no external script
• User journeys with named visitors — every visitor gets a persistent ID and a generated three-part name (e.g. “Roaming Copper Wren”) so long journeys are actually legible across return visits
• Page-to-page flow — see exactly which path your best visitors walk, and where the rest drop off
• Conversion tracking — phone, email, directions, bookings, plus auto-detection of form submissions from Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Formidable, Ninja Forms, Forminator, and others
• 404 monitor — every missing page visitors hit, with the page that sent them, so you can fix the broken link or add a redirect
• Long-term aggregate storage — daily totals kept indefinitely in a local SQLite file even when raw rows are purged on schedule, so five-year trend lines don’t require holding five years of personal data

AI-readable analytics

Kantan ships with a downloadable AI agent that reads your data through the WordPress REST API using an application password you generate. Ask it questions in plain English — “Which conversions came from organic traffic last month?”, “Who are my five most engaged returning visitors?”, “Draft me a paragraph about this week’s biggest spike.” It reads; you approve. Nothing it sees leaves your terminal unless you ask.

Kantan is also an MCP server: with the MCP Adapter plugin active, one claude mcp add command connects Claude Code (or any MCP client) to 19 read-only, typed analytics tools at /wp-json/kantan/mcp — built on the WordPress Abilities API, no separate credential scheme, nothing writable by an agent.

Built for self-hosting

• Free forever, GPL v2
• No accounts, no signups, no SaaS dashboard
• Runs on any standard WordPress install (6.9+, PHP 7.0+)
• ~2 MB plugin, 5–50 MB/year of data depending on traffic
• Extensible sidebar tab system — companion plugins like Kantan SEO snap in alongside the analytics tabs

Privacy

Kantan Analytics is built to collect the minimum needed to give you useful visitor insight, and to keep all of it on your own server.

What is recorded: page views, click positions (as percentages, not pixels), scroll depth, in-session navigation paths, traffic source and referrer, UTM parameters, conversions (form submissions, phone/email/directions clicks), and approximate device, browser, operating system, and screen resolution parsed from the request.

What is not recorded: Kantan does not set cookies and does not store visitor IP addresses. The visitor’s country is resolved from a bundled offline database at the moment of the visit, after which the raw IP is discarded — no geolocation lookup ever leaves your server. Region-level data is optional and requires you to add your own city database. No data is ever transmitted to Kantan or the plugin author.

Country data: country resolution uses the free DB-IP Lite database (“IP Geolocation by DB-IP”, https://db-ip.com/), licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

Optional data sharing (off by default): The Attribution Webhook is the only feature that can send data off your server, and it is disabled until you turn it on. When you enable it and provide a destination URL, Kantan forwards each conversion event — with any UTM/campaign and passthrough parameters you’ve allow-listed — to that endpoint, which is typically your own CRM or marketing-automation tool. You choose whether to enable it and where the data goes; nothing is sent until you do.

Retention: detailed session records are deleted automatically after a configurable window (default 90 days). Beyond that, a local SQLite file keeps daily totals, a summary per random visitor ID (first and last visit, visit counts, first traffic source) and the conversions recorded against it.

Disclosure helper: Kantan registers suggested text with WordPress’ built-in Privacy Policy tool (Settings → Privacy), so you can add an accurate disclosure to your site’s policy in one click.

Support

Questions, bugs, or feature requests? Email hello@trykantan.com — or use the Support & Bug Reports card in the dashboard’s Settings tab, which pre-fills your plugin, WordPress, and PHP versions plus your site URL so we can help faster. We read every message.