Google Analytics alternatives, compared by someone who sells one

Disclosure, before anything else: we make Ethical Analytics, one of the five tools on this page. We have an obvious interest in you picking ours. Our defence is method, not neutrality: every claim below was read from the named vendor's own pricing or product pages on 26 August 2026, each section links to the source so you can check us, and we recommend competitors by name where they are the better fit — which, for plenty of readers, they will be.

People leave Google Analytics for two reasons that compound: GA4 is genuinely hard to use, and feeding your visitors' behaviour to an advertising company sits badly with a growing number of site owners (and with their cookie-banner obligations). The privacy-first alternatives are all good products. They differ in ways that only show up once you know what to compare on — so that's the structure of this page.

The four things that actually differ

What you pay for. Two pricing models dominate: per pageview (Plausible, Fathom, Matomo Cloud — a busy month costs more) and per site (us — a busy month costs the same). Which is cheaper depends entirely on your traffic-to-sites ratio.
Whether a free tier exists. Plausible and Fathom deliberately have none (trials only — a position Fathom defends openly on its pricing page). GoatCounter and Matomo self-hosted are free. We have a real free tier, capped at two sites.
Retention. Ranges from 3 years (Plausible Starter) to "forever" (Fathom). Ask separately about visitor-level data: aggregate history and identifiable-ish raw rows are different promises, and most pricing pages only talk about the first.
The privacy philosophy's edges. All five are cookieless-by-default for analytics. The edges differ: GoatCounter deliberately ignores Do Not Track (its author explains why); Matomo is a full behaviour suite (heatmaps, session recordings) that can be configured consent-free; we honour DNT and GPC at both script and server, which costs us data and we think is the point.

At a glance

Tool	Model	Entry price	Free tier	Self-host
Plausible	Per pageview, tiered	$9/mo (10k views, 1 site)	No — 30-day trial	Yes (open source)
Fathom	Per pageview, tiered	Smallest tier 100k views ($45/mo at 500k; slider shows each tier)	No — 7-day trial	No
Matomo	Cloud per "hit", tiered; or self-host	Cloud from €29/mo (50k hits)	Self-hosted is free	Yes (its origin)
GoatCounter	Donation-supported	£0	Yes — the whole thing	Yes (open source)
Ethical Analytics	Per site, flat	£5/$6 per site/mo (£40/$48/yr)	Yes — 2 sites, 60-day history	No

All figures read from the linked pages on 2026-08-26; pricing pages change, so treat the links as the source of truth. Plausible and Matomo prices rise with traffic tiers; Fathom's smallest tier covers 100k pageviews and its widget prices each tier — we could only verify the 500k figure on our read date.

Plausible — the category's reference point

If this page had a default recommendation for a paying customer, it would be Plausible. Open source, EU-hosted on European-owned infrastructure, cookieless, and the dashboard is the one the rest of the category gets compared to. The Starter plan ($9/month for 10k pageviews) covers one site with 3 years of retention; Growth ($14) covers 3 sites, Business ($19) covers 10 and adds funnels, a stats API and 5-year retention. The catch is simply the model: no free tier, and the price climbs with pageviews. A high-traffic hobby site pays like a business.

Fathom — many sites, forever retention

Fathom's distinctive offer is volume: every plan includes at least 50 sites and "forever" data retention while you're a customer. If you run a portfolio of small sites, one Fathom subscription covers the lot — the same shape of problem our per-site pricing solves from the other end, and for large portfolios Fathom's bundle will beat us on price. No free tier, and they're refreshingly blunt about why (their pricing FAQ is worth reading as a piece of writing). Worth knowing: custom events count against your pageview allowance, and the current product is cloud-only — there's no self-hosted option.

Matomo — the full suite, and the most to configure

Matomo is the oldest and most complete tool here — closer to a GA replacement than a GA alternative, with heatmaps, session recordings and a data warehouse connector. Self-hosted it is genuinely free with unlimited users and hits (premium plugin bundles cost extra); the Cloud version starts at €29/month for 50k "hits" (note: a hit is any tracked request — pageviews, events, downloads — so budget above your pageview count) with data stored in Frankfurt. The flip side of all that capability: features like session recording put more of the compliance configuration on you. Matomo can absolutely be run consent-free — their own pages explain how — but it's a setup you make, not a property of the tool.

GoatCounter — the best £0 in analytics

GoatCounter is open source, donation-supported, and free for "reasonable public usage" — a personal site or small business is explicitly fine. It counts unique visits without cookies, has a no-JS pixel option, and treats accessibility as a headline feature, which is rarer than it should be. Two honest caveats: it's substantially one person's project (sustainability is a donation away), and it deliberately ignores Do Not Track — the author's reasoning is published and worth reading even if, like us, you land on the other side of it. If your budget is zero and your traffic modest, start here or with our free tier and see which report you keep opening.

Ours — where we honestly fit

Ethical Analytics is the smallest product on this page and prices the other way up: per site, flat, £5/$6 a month (or £40/$48 a year) per site, with a free account covering two sites at 60 days' history. That model wins when you have steady or spiky traffic on a few sites and lose count of pageview tiers; it loses to Fathom's 50-site bundles for big portfolios. What we'd put against any tool here: raw visitor-level rows are purged within 90 days on every plan — paying more never extends the identifiable-ish window, because that promise belongs to your visitors, not to us — DNT and GPC are honoured at script and server, and our "unique visitors" number says on the report page that it's a sum of daily uniques, because our daily-destroyed salt makes cross-day recognition impossible and we'd rather print the caveat than a rounder number. The honest limitation: no cross-day journeys or returning-visitor rates, ever, by design. Also honest: you can't buy Pro yet — there's no checkout; today you'd email us. Two free sites is the real product meanwhile.

So which one?

Budget £0, modest traffic: GoatCounter, or our free tier — run both for a month, keep the one you actually open.
One or a few sites, want the polished default: Plausible.
A big portfolio of sites: Fathom's 50-site plans.
Need heatmaps, recordings, or full control on your own servers: Matomo (self-hosted if you have the ops appetite).
A few sites, spiky traffic, and you want the strictest privacy defaults with the caveats printed: that's the gap we built ours for.

The comparison test we'd suggest (works on every tool here, including ours): open the vendor's docs and look for three sentences — what happens to the raw IP, what happens on DNT/GPC, and what their "unique visitors" number actually counts. The tools on this page all survive the first question. They diverge on the other two, and so will your view of them. Our three answers are in our docs, workings shown.

Every price and feature claim above was read from the linked vendor pages on 2026-08-26 and will drift; the links are the source of truth. Related reading: what "cookieless" actually means · do you need a cookie banner just for analytics? · analytics for a site with (almost) no traffic yet. CAAC, August 2026.

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