Web analytics tools, compared

Pick the right category first:

• Traffic analytics - how many people, from where, reading what. Almost everything below.
• Product analytics - event-level behavior inside a logged-in app, by user. PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel.
• Behavior tools - session recordings and heatmaps. Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar. Different job, and they need consent because they record people.

This page compares traffic analytics.

What each costs, and what it counts

Annual pricing in USD, on annual billing where the vendor offers it. The unit column matters more than the price column - read it before comparing any two numbers.

Three billing details change the answer:

Matomo bills hits. Pageviews, events, downloads, outlinks, searches, and content tracking can each count.

Simple Analytics and Umami bill stored properties. One event with five properties can count as six units.

Plausible Starter covers one site and its owner. Business adds custom properties, funnels, and teammates. At one million pageviews, it costs $1,390.

The tools, one at a time

Google Analytics 4 - free, and the only one with Google Ads in it

Use GA4 when Google Ads drives your business. The integration has no match here. GA4 is free at any volume and offers BigQuery export.

It sets cookies. Event-level retention lasts 2 or 14 months. Reports can be thresholded or sampled. Its gtag.js measured 148,451 bytes gzipped on September 3, 2026.

Best for: paid-media teams living inside Google’s stack.

Matomo - the deepest feature set, and the on-premise answer

Matomo has segments, custom dimensions, heatmaps, A/B testing, roll-up reports, and ecommerce. It’s GPL-3.0, hosts Cloud in Europe, and offers the core On-Premise product free.

Cloud costs $2,040 a year at one million hits. Premium plugins cost extra.

Best for: organizations that need depth, EU hosting or a real on-premise install, and have someone to run it.

Plausible - the mature one, hosted in Germany

Plausible is a mature product hosted in Germany. Its 1,291-byte tracker is the smallest we measured. Community Edition uses AGPL-3.0-or-later and includes the Stats API.

Cloud Business starts at $1,390 a year for one million pageviews and adds custom properties, funnels, revenue, and the Stats API. Scheduled raw export is an Enterprise feature.

Best for: EU buyers who want a mature product from an EU company and don’t need the Business-tier features.

Fathom - EU isolation on every plan, and a long track record

Fathom includes EU isolation and says retention is forever. The one-million pageview plan includes 75 sites and costs $600 a year.

Plans start at 100,000 pageviews and $150 a year. The hosted product is closed source.

Best for: EU data isolation without leaving a US-run product, and anyone who values a vendor that’s been around a while.

Umami - MIT, and the most permissive license here

Umami is MIT-licensed and self-hostable. Cloud Pro costs $240 a year through one million events.

Watch the unit - each stored event property counts as an event. And their own FAQ says Cloud includes email reports and a streaming API that the self-hosted build doesn’t.

Best for: developers who want MIT, and low-to-mid-traffic sites where the flat $20 is unbeatable.

Pirsch - cheap, German, and unlimited seats

$540 a year at a million pageviews on Standard, unlimited team members, unlimited retention, 50 sites. German company, closed-source product with an AGPL Go tracking library. Standard has no funnels and no teams; those are on Plus, which is $1,590 at a million.

Best for: price-sensitive buyers who want a German vendor and don’t need funnels.

GoatCounter - small, careful, and free for reasonable use

A one-person, cookieless, self-hosted project. Hosting is free for reasonable public use and funded by donations.

Best for: personal sites and small projects where the tool should be free and stay out of the way.

Cloudflare Web Analytics - free, cookieless, shallow

Free, explicitly cookieless, and a two-minute job if your site is already behind Cloudflare. The limits are the point: shallow reporting, no meaningful goals or custom events, no data export, retention not published, and no way to take your history elsewhere.

Best for: a free traffic counter on a site you don’t need to analyze.

Simple Analytics - clean, and priced by datapoint

Dutch, EU-hosted, and one of the tidier dashboards in the category. $600 a year at a million. The unit is the thing to model: pageviews, events and each stored event property all count, and seats are $240 a year each beyond the first.

Best for: EU-hosted simplicity where one person does the looking.

Feasible - us

Feasible costs $9.99 a month or $99 a year: unlimited sites, unlimited team members, unlimited custom properties, and a million pageviews and custom events a month between them, kept five years. Cookieless, AGPL-3.0-or-later, one Go binary on SQLite that runs on 512 MB of RAM. The API, funnels, custom properties, webhooks and raw event export are in every plan and every build.

Where we lose: no EU hosting, SSO, or SAML. No mobile SDKs, no session replay, no heatmaps, no A/B testing, no cohort report. Our script is 3,377 bytes gzipped against Plausible’s 1,291. We’re also new.

Best for: people running more than one site, or more than one person, who want everything included and don’t want a plan ladder.

How to choose

One small site, no budget. GoatCounter’s hosted tier or Cloudflare. Both free, both cookieless, both shallow - which is fine when the question is “did anyone read it”.

Running Google Ads seriously. GA4. Nothing here replaces the ad integration, and swapping it out to save $99 would be a bad trade.

One site, EU company, want a mature product. Plausible. Germany-hosted, polished, and the entry plan is $190 a year at 100k.

Several sites, or several people. This is where per-site and per-seat pricing stops being trivial. Fathom includes 75 sites; Pirsch has unlimited seats; Feasible has both unlimited. Count your sites and your teammates before you look at the headline price.

You need depth, or on-premise, or EU public-sector procurement. Matomo. It’s the deepest tool here and the one with the longest institutional track record.

You want MIT. Umami.

You want everything included for one price and you’ll take a US vendor. Feasible, which is us, and we’d say that.

Prices move. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it. More detail on Google Analytics alternatives, our pricing, and the head-to-head comparisons.