Matomo 5.14.0 Ships With Real-Time Analytics That Actually Respect Privacy Rules
The latest stable release brings aggregated counters you can run without the Visits Log.
Matomo published version 5.14.0, the newest stable minor release in the 5.x series. The headline feature is a privacy-friendly way to keep live dashboards running when your organization has disabled the traditional Visits Log to satisfy GDPR-style rules. Not that you always have to pick between visibility and compliance, but the tension is real. This update tries to defuse it.
The new capability is called aggregated real-time counters. Normally the Live / Visits Log shows what individual visitors are doing right now: who is on the site, which page they landed on, what they clicked next. Turn that off for privacy reasons and the real-time pulse disappears with it. Version 5.14.0 brings back a version that shows just the number of live visits and actions, with no individual detail attached. You keep the traffic signal. You just don't capture anyone's session data.
Enable it under the Administration gear, then System => General settings => Live, or set it per site by editing an individual website. The underlying work was tracked as GitHub issue #24969, titled "Show aggregated real-time counters when Visits Log is disabled," and it was implemented by Nathan Gavin.
The privacy angle is the story
This sits right at the center of what Matomo is. The project launched back in 2007 as Piwik, an open-source answer to Google Analytics built around data ownership and privacy concerns. The name changed later, partly because "Matomo" means honesty in Japanese. The company's own tagline, "Built on open source. Governed by ethics. Powered by insight," isn't just marketing fluff if you've watched analytics tools quietly gut real-time features over the past few years. Google's shift to the privacy-light GA4 mode left a lot of compliance-conscious buyers hunting for a lifeline. Matomo is happy to be that lifeline. And the ISO 27001:2022 certification they announced last year matters more than you might expect if you're trying to sell analytics to a bank or a hospital, both of which have very little patience for US cloud tracking.
It's arguably competing with the exact privacy complaints that birthed the project, which is a nice circle to close.
Beyond the headline
The rest of the release is a grab bag of reporting, AI, and UI fixes. The AI chatbot now shows what percentage of the report total its numbers represent, so those chat-derived figures are actually readable in context (#25090 and #25076, Sébastien Siehl). Forecasting got a bump too: unique visitors and distinct counts can be projected from period-level history, which should improve forward-looking traffic predictions (#25175, Martin Neudert).
There's also the long-awaited pie chart fix. Those charts were being rendered as squashed ovals for what felt like years. Issue #3426 dates back a while, and Nathan Gavin finally got them drawn as true circles with clean slice edges (#24928). Selected goal conversions now display in bar, pie, and evolution charts as well (#25084).
The login flow got some attention too. Empty login fields are now reported instead of just greying out the sign-in button (#25056), and the login and invitation pages picked up a layout refresh. They even added a "What's New" panel, so logging in now doubles as your release-notes touchpoint (#25058). Minor, perhaps, but those are the little details that add up.
Tag Manager and housekeeping
Matomo Tag Manager rolled out its own v11.x set of fixes. A couple stand out: an error that fired when creating new tags now resolves (#1157, AltamashShaikh), the loader no longer breaks in dark mode (#1184, Chippison), and type parameters for tags, triggers, and variables are now properly typed as plugin settings (#1190, Martin Neudert).
On the performance side, the Marketplace page loads faster (#25207, snake14), the compliance page splits "All Websites" out of its selector to clarify scope when managing privacy settings (#25152, Nathan Gavin), and there's a batch of smaller UI tweaks around sparkline card sizing and tooltip restoration.
If you're on 5.13.x, here's the good news: there is no major database upgrade here, so this should be a low-risk jump. Downloads are live on GitHub as matomo-5.14.0.tar.gz (~21.6 MB) and matomo-5.14.0.zip (~27 MB), both signed with .asc GPG files. You'll also spot legacy-named piwik-5.14.0 archives floating around. Same software, just under the project's original name.
One bit of timing worth flagging. This ships just days after the Matomo 6.0.0 beta, which dropped September 9, with a second beta, 6.0.0-b2, arriving on September 17 and a 5.14.1-alpha is already being built. Treat 5.14.0 as the safe stable line while the team points at 6.0. Right now it sits roughly 238 commits behind the 6.x-dev head.
Head here to the official changelog if you want the full ticket-by-ticket breakdown and here for the GitHub release page.
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