In short
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-by-default 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.
The picks
Best for people who want one clean screen
The default recommendation in this category, and usually the right one. Cookieless, EU-owned, 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.
Best for the bare essentials
Lightweight and pleasant: pageviews, sources, events and funnels, and nothing else. No session replay. Pick it if you want the smallest tool that still covers the basics.
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, 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, and it is newer than everything above. If either of those matters, pick something else on this list.
Compared
| Tool | From | Banner? | Replay | Funnels |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible | $9/mo | No | No | Yes |
| Fathom | $15/mo | No | No | No |
| Matomo | ~EUR 19/mo | Depends | Yes | Yes |
| Umami | Varies | No | No | Yes |
| Simple Analytics | EUR 20/mo | No | No | No |
| Pirsch | $6/mo | No | No | Yes |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | Yes | Yes | Basic |
| PostHog | Usage-based | Depends | Yes | Yes |
| mrkr | From $5/mo | No in cookieless mode | Yes | Yes |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | Yes | No | Yes |
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.
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.
FAQ
Four reasons, roughly in order: GA4 requires a cookie banner in the EU, UK, and California, and the banner costs you data. GA4 samples reports on high-traffic properties. The GA4 interface is widely disliked. And a meaningful share of visitors block the Google Analytics script outright.
Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, Pirsch, and mrkr are all cookieless by default and need no consent banner. Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, and GA4 itself all set cookies and do require one. Matomo and PostHog can be configured either way.
Of the privacy-first options, only Matomo and mrkr. Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, and Pirsch have none at any tier. Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, and PostHog have replay but set cookies.
Yes. Microsoft Clarity is free and unlimited for replay and heatmaps. Plausible, Fathom, and mrkr are all trial-only, with no free tier; mrkr's trial is $1 for 14 days rather than a free one.
Export it before you switch. None of these tools import GA4 history, so the practical approach is to export what you need, run both in parallel for a month to sanity-check the numbers, then cut over.
No, and they should not. Cookieless tools count a visitor differently, and most of these filter bots more aggressively than GA4 does. Expect different absolute numbers and consistent trends. If a tool matches GA4 exactly, it is probably counting bots.
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