What are Premium plugins? How do they differ from open source/free plugins?
To realise our epic mission, the Matomo team and the ever-growing community are building our dozens of popular tools around the project under fully open source/libre license: the Matomo core platforms (including all hundreds of features), the Matomo contributed plugins, Tracking SDKs, dozens of libraries to integrate Matomo with some of your favourite tools, and even more useful tools and products.
The founders of Matomo, core engineers and some other innovative companies are also offering some premium plugins which can be purchased on the Matomo Marketplace. As opposed to open source plugins, these premium plugins are not released under an open source compatible license and you are not allowed to redistribute premium plugins to others. (Note: if you ever need to edit or modify the source code, you can get a permission on simple request to the developers.)
Why Premium plugins? Researching, building, documenting, testing and maintaining quality products take years of experience and months of work. When you purchase a premium plugin you get a fully working product, with free updates for duration of license and you stay in full control of your analytics data. When purchasing a premium plugins you also directly help the Matomo core engineers to grow and keep innovate! That’s because a % of earnings on premium plugin license sales directly fund the new Matomo versions and cool features. In particular, plugins sales will fund:
- the core Matomo Analytics platform innovation: where everything is open and will always be.
- all free and open source plugins created and maintained by us. Already twelve of them and we will create more in the future.
- our free Long Term Support for all users of Matomo.
To summarise: everything that the Matomo project officially releases under “Matomo” is open source and free software and this will never change. On the Marketplace, innovative companies also sell Premium features for Matomo (such as Media Analytics, Audit Log or Experiments – A/B Testing) and when your purchase them you help support building more great features in the Free Software Matomo Analytics platform.