Written by the team behind one of them, which is why every entry says what it is genuinely best at and where ours loses. Last checked against live vendor pricing pages.
For most sites it is Plausible: cookieless, simple, established, $9 a month. Pick Fathom for many sites on a flat price, Matomo for the deepest feature set, Microsoft Clarity for free session replay, and Mrkr if you want cookieless analytics and session replay in one tool. There is no single right answer, only a right answer per case.
Almost nobody uses most of GA4. The parts people open are visitors over time, where they came from, which pages they read, and which of that turned into something. Every tool below covers the first three.
Best for people who want one clean screen
The default recommendation in this category, and usually the right one. Cookieless, EU-owned, open source under AGPL, and deliberately minimal: traffic, sources, pages, goals, and nothing else. No session replay, no cohorts, no per-visitor detail, and those omissions are on purpose. If you find yourself wishing it did more, you have outgrown the product rather than found a bug.
Best for many sites on a flat price
Unlimited sites and forever retention at a flat rate, which makes it the cheapest option for an agency or anyone running a portfolio of small sites. Cookieless, straightforward, and stable. No funnels, no replay, no cohorts. It counts things well and stops there.
Best if you want everything and will accept the weight
The most complete feature set in privacy analytics: replay, heatmaps, funnels, ecommerce, attribution, custom reports. It is also the heaviest, the most configuration-hungry, and cookies are on unless you turn them off, so the no-banner claim depends on how you set it up. Self-hosting is free and genuinely viable if you have someone to run it.
Best free self-hosted option
MIT-licensed, lightweight, and pleasant to self-host on a small VPS. The cloud tier is fine but not differentiated. No session replay. Pick it if running your own analytics is something you actively want to do rather than tolerate.
Best for strict EU data residency
Dutch company, data stays in the Netherlands, and the positioning is entirely about that. If your procurement process has a data-residency clause with a specific country in it, this is a short conversation. No replay, no funnels.
Cheapest entry point
German-hosted, cookieless, and the lowest paid price in the category with a surprisingly high site limit. Has funnels. No session replay. A good pick for a developer with many small projects and a tight budget.
Best free session replay
Unlimited session replay and heatmaps for nothing, which no paid product can match on price. The costs are elsewhere: it sets cookies so you need consent, it has no traffic sources or campaign attribution, and Microsoft is the controller of your visitors' data. Nobody reports monthly numbers out of Clarity, so it ends up running alongside something else.
Best if you also need feature flags and experiments
Not really a Google Analytics replacement, it is a product-analytics platform that happens to include web analytics. Replay, funnels, flags, experiments, surveys, warehouse. Enormously capable and enormously more complex. If nobody on your team will own that complexity, it becomes shelfware.
Best if you want privacy and session replay in one tool
Our product, so weigh this accordingly. The specific gap it fills: Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, and Pirsch all have no session replay at any price, and the replay tools all need consent. Mrkr does cookieless analytics, replay, funnels, cohorts, retention, and revenue attribution in one dataset, with an optional cookie mode per site if you need cross-session identity, which does then need consent. It has no heatmaps and no surveys, it is newer than everything above, and it cannot be self-hosted. If any of those three matter, pick something else on this list.
| Tool | From | Banner? | Replay | Funnels | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible | $9/mo | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fathom | $15/mo | No | No | No | No |
| Matomo | ~EUR 19/mo | Depends | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Umami | Free self-hosted, paid cloud | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Simple Analytics | EUR 20/mo | No | No | No | No |
| Pirsch | $6/mo | No | No | Yes | No |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | Yes | Yes | Basic | No |
| PostHog | Usage-based | Depends | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mrkr | From $5/mo | No in cookieless mode | Yes | Yes | No |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | Yes | No | Yes | No |
Every price and capability checked against the vendor's own pricing or feature page on 2026-08-24. Vendors change packaging often, so confirm before you buy.
The Mrkr demo is a fully populated dashboard on real demo traffic. It is the fastest way to calibrate what the rest of this table is describing.
Open the live demo
Buy Plausible or Fathom and stop reading. The rest of the list is cost you will not use.
Clarity is free and needs consent. Mrkr and Matomo do replay without one.
Simple Analytics for the Netherlands, Pirsch or Matomo for Germany.
Matomo, Umami, PostHog, and Plausible. Mrkr, Fathom, Pirsch, and Clarity are hosted only.
The head-to-head rather than the roundup.
The two cookieless options compared.
What free actually costs.
The mechanism behind the no-banner claim.
Bounce rate, cohorts, attribution, defined.
No signup required.
Drop in the script and watch them land. It takes about a minute.