Plausible is a good product and for most sites it is the right one. This is the list for the specific cases where it is not, written by a competitor who will say so.
Fathom for many sites on a flat price. Umami if you want to self-host under a permissive licence. Pirsch for the cheapest entry. Simple Analytics for Dutch data residency. Matomo if you outgrew simple. Mrkr if you want session replay, cohorts, and revenue attribution while staying cookieless by default.
Everything on this list except Microsoft Clarity is cookieless, so this is not a privacy comparison. It is a question of what you need beyond a traffic dashboard, and how many sites you are counting.
Plausible answers how many and from where, cleanly. What it does not answer is what a session looked like, whether last month’s visitors came back, and which campaign produced the revenue. If you never ask those, Plausible remains the better tool.
A salt that rotates daily, nothing persistent stored on the device. Identical across all six tools.
None of them can tell you the Monday visitor came back on Friday. Retention is directional.
An optional per-site cookie mode buys the exactness, and brings the consent obligation back.
Best for many sites on a flat price
Unlimited sites and retention that never expires, on a flat rate. For an agency or anyone with a portfolio of small sites it is the cheapest correct answer in the category. No funnels, no replay, no cohorts. It counts things well and deliberately stops there.
Best free self-hosted option
MIT licensed rather than AGPL, lightweight, and pleasant to run on a small server. Pageviews, sources, events, and funnels. No replay. Pick it if running your own analytics is something you want to do rather than tolerate, and if the more permissive licence matters to you.
Best for strict Dutch data residency
A Dutch company keeping data in the Netherlands, with the whole positioning built on that. If a procurement form names a jurisdiction, this is a one-sentence answer. Minimal beyond that: no funnels, no replay.
Cheapest paid entry point
German-hosted, cookieless, funnels included, and the lowest paid price here with a surprisingly high site limit. For a developer with many small projects and a tight budget it beats Plausible on arithmetic. No session replay.
Best if you outgrew simple
The deepest product in privacy analytics: funnels, cohorts, session recording, heatmaps, form analytics, tag management, ecommerce. It is also the heaviest and cookies are on by default, so the no-banner property depends on configuration rather than coming for free.
Best free session replay
Included because it is the tool most often added next to Plausible rather than instead of it. Unlimited replay and heatmaps for nothing. It sets cookies so consent applies, it has no traffic sources, and Microsoft holds the data. Not a Plausible replacement, but frequently the missing half.
Best if you want replay and revenue without a banner
Our product, so the limits first: no heatmaps, no surveys, no self-hosting, and it is newer than everything above. Plausible is more established and open source, and for a simple traffic dashboard it is the safer choice. Where Mrkr differs is depth without giving up the cookieless default: session replay, cohorts and retention, per-visitor detail, and revenue attributed to the source that produced it.
Still the default recommendation
Worth saying outright: for most sites Plausible is the right tool and this list is unnecessary. Cookieless, AGPL, EU-owned, established, and deliberately minimal. The reasons to move are specific: you need session replay, you need retention curves, you have many sites and want a flatter price, or you need a named jurisdiction.
| Tool | From | Banner? | Replay | Funnels | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible | $9/mo | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fathom | $15/mo | No | No | No | No |
| 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 |
| Matomo Cloud | ~EUR 19/mo | Depends on configuration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | Yes | Yes | Basic | No |
| Mrkr | From $5/mo, 14-day trial | No, in the default cookieless mode | Yes | Yes | No |
Every vendor in this table details checked against the vendor's own pricing and feature pages on 2026-08-24. Where a vendor does not publish a fixed list price, this table says how they charge rather than guessing a number. Vendors change packaging often, so confirm before you buy.
Replay, cohorts, journeys, and revenue attribution all run on the live demo. No signup, no card, and the demo sets no cookies.
Open the live demo
The head-to-head rather than the roundup.
The wider field, including GA4 itself.
Flat pricing against more depth.
The counting method they all share.
The capability most of this list lacks.
The depth, on a real dataset.
Drop in the script and watch them land. It takes about a minute.