Matomo's argument is simple and it has aged well. Web analytics conventionally works by sending detailed records of your visitors' behaviour to a third party, who stores it on their infrastructure, under their terms, subject to their jurisdiction, and who in the dominant case also runs an advertising business. For a long time almost nobody thought about this, and then a combination of GDPR, a series of European regulatory decisions about transatlantic data transfer, and a general hardening of attitudes toward data made it a live question. Matomo's answer is that you run the analytics yourself, on your own servers, and the visitor data never goes anywhere else.
Whether that is worth the operational cost depends entirely on your situation, but it is a real and unusual option and the training explains it honestly. The free video material is about four hours total, split between Matomo Analytics and Tag Manager, supported by written user guides. It is competent, unglamorous and gets you to productive use. The section I would single out is the consent and data ownership material, which reads as though written by people who actually hold the convictions rather than by a compliance function producing required text.
There is a difference, and you can tell. Anyone who has sat through a vendor's privacy module that consists of the words we take your privacy seriously followed by a feature list will recognise the contrast. The certification situation is the notable finding and it needs stating clearly because there is active confusion in the market. Matomo used to run an official certification programme and discontinued it in May 2020.
There is currently no official Matomo certification. What there is, in abundance, is a set of third-party training companies selling Matomo courses that issue their own certificates, several of which are marketed in language carefully constructed to sound official. This is exactly the pattern I have documented for Fivetran and Pulumi in this catalogue: where genuine search demand exists for a credential and the vendor does not supply one, third parties will sell you something that certifies nothing. The certificates are not fraudulent in the sense that you do receive a course and a document at the end.
They are worthless in the sense that no employer checking with Matomo will find any programme to verify against. If you want the skill, take the free official videos. If someone is charging you for a Matomo certification, understand what you are buying. The honest weakness of the training is length.
Four hours covers a platform that does a great deal, and a learner who wants to go deep on goal configuration, custom dimensions, the reporting API or the subtleties of server-side tracking will run out of material quickly and be sent to documentation. For a product whose main competitor is free and enormously better documented by a vast ecosystem of third-party content, that thinness is a real competitive problem rather than a minor quibble. The larger thing the training soft-pedals is what self-hosting actually costs. Running Matomo for a small site is straightforward.
Running it for a site with substantial traffic means a database that grows quickly, archiving jobs that need tuning and scheduling, a server that needs capacity planning, upgrades that need testing, backups that need verifying, and someone whose job it is to notice when report generation starts falling behind. That is a real ongoing engineering commitment, and the correct comparison is not Matomo self-hosted versus a hosted competitor on features, it is the total cost including the staff time. For an organisation with a platform team this is marginal. For a five-person company with a strong privacy conviction and no operations capacity, self-hosting is a trap and the cloud plan is the honest answer.
The training does not frame the decision that way and it should, because the people most attracted to the privacy argument are frequently the least equipped to run the infrastructure. The premium plugin question is worth knowing about too. A number of capabilities that a serious analytics practice will want are premium plugins rather than part of the free core, which is a reasonable business model for an open source company and is not always obvious from the free-and-open framing. Budget accordingly.
Three point six. Honest, free, genuinely useful training for a platform with a real and increasingly relevant argument, marked down for being thin, for underplaying the operational reality of self-hosting, and for a discontinued certification that has left the field to people selling credentials with nothing behind them.