I also tried a bunch but am now keeping Matomo. I like it for its cookieless (and as such consent-less) mode.
what I miss from GUA/GA4 is a "top pages" report. Matomo seems to only support a url-path-based treeview like Pages report which makes it quite difficult to find the top performing pages if the site has many sections/categories
If you like Matomo, I built (over the last 13 years) a (premium) self-hosted solution similar to it: https://uxwizz.com
The main difference is that UXWizz is self-hosted only, so there are no "premium" features hidden in the cloud-only solution (like their heatmaps) or features that cost extra per month. Apart from this, the performance and ease is considerably better than Matomo's.
Depending on the size of your site both GA or Matomo might be overkill. Both of them are huge systems. If you’re just running your private site both of them are mostly „too much“ and you’re never gonna use more than 20% of their features.
There’s much more lightweight solutions out there that also collect much less data.
One option which I couldn’t find on this site is „Umami“ - which is what I use now for most of my private sites and small clients.
Setting it up was easy.
After some time of using it, I now like it even better than Google Analytics.
Is there any reason for me to try out one of the others?