No. 1
Absolutely Analytics
A 1,270-byte script, no cookie banner, and a billing policy that does not punish a good week.
Privacy-first and cookieless8.9/10
Free, independent and comprehensive
30 web analytics tools, scored and ranked
A free and comprehensive resource for web marketers choosing analytics tools for their websites. Ten weighted measures, every price read on the same day, no paid placements and no affiliate links.
30TOOLS REVIEWED
10WEIGHTED MEASURES
33HEAD TO HEAD PAGES
12ALTERNATIVES GUIDES
0PAID PLACEMENTS
The thesis
What I am actually measuring
Most sites are over-tooled and under-informed. The best analytics tool for a website is the one that answers three questions, who came, what they read, and whether they stayed, without a consent banner, without a tag manager, and without costing you a tenth of a second of load time.
That is an opinion, and it is the opinion the ranking below encodes. It is stated here rather than buried so that you can disagree with it usefully: if behaviour tooling matters more to you than script weight, the weights on the methodology page tell you exactly which numbers to change and roughly where each tool would land if you did.
Three consequences follow, and all three are deliberate. Heatmap and session replay tools score low overall, because they hand your site a large script and a consent obligation to answer one question. Product analytics platforms score below their reputation, because most of the sites reading this are websites rather than software products. And Google Analytics 4 finishes last, which is the honest result of weighting consent loss, script weight and data ownership at all.
A low rank is not a warning. Every entry here names who should choose it, and several of the tools near the bottom are the right answer to a specific question. Microsoft Clarity is free at any volume and no ranking changes that. Google Analytics 4 is close to mandatory if you buy Google Ads. Read the category pages if you already know what kind of tool you need.
The short answer
If you want one recommendation
- Absolutely Analytics, a 1,270-byte script, no cookie banner, and a billing policy that does not punish a good week. 8.9 out of 10.
- Plausible Analytics, the tool that made simple, cookieless analytics a category, still one of the two best in it. 8.0 out of 10.
- Pirsch Analytics, the cheapest serious cookieless tool here: fifty sites and unlimited seats at six dollars. 7.5 out of 10.
Scores are weighted means out of 10, relative to this list only. See the method.
The ranking
All 30 tools, worst to best is bottom to top
Filter by category, or read the category pages for the context behind each group. Showing 30 of 30.
No. 2
Plausible Analytics
The tool that made simple, cookieless analytics a category, still one of the two best in it.
Privacy-first and cookieless8.0/10
No. 3
Pirsch Analytics
The cheapest serious cookieless tool here: fifty sites and unlimited seats at six dollars.
Privacy-first and cookieless7.5/10
No. 4
Umami
The open-source cookieless tool that is genuinely pleasant to self-host.
Open source and self-hosted7.5/10
No. 5
Fathom Analytics
Fifty sites on one bill and a dashboard you can read in four seconds.
Privacy-first and cookieless7.4/10
No. 6
PostHog
Analytics, replay, flags and experiments in one tool, on a free tier most teams never outgrow.
Product and event analytics7.1/10
No. 7
Swetrix
Open-source cookieless analytics with error tracking and session replay built in.
Open source and self-hosted7.1/10
No. 8
Matomo
Eighteen years old, feature for feature a match for Google Analytics, and yours to host.
Open source and self-hosted7.0/10
No. 9
Cloudflare Web Analytics
Free, cookieless, and if your site already sits behind Cloudflare it needs no script at all.
Platform-native and free6.9/10
No. 10
GoatCounter
Deliberately tiny, deliberately free, and honest about being neither polished nor ambitious.
Open source and self-hosted6.9/10
No. 11
Simple Analytics
Dutch, cookieless, and unusually good at telling you how much traffic everyone else is missing.
Privacy-first and cookieless6.9/10
No. 12
Cabin Analytics
Cookieless analytics that also reports the carbon cost of the traffic it is counting.
Privacy-first and cookieless6.6/10
No. 13
Shynet
Analytics that works with JavaScript switched off, because it counts with an image.
Open source and self-hosted6.6/10
No. 14
Mixpanel
Sixteen years of funnel and retention work, and still the clearest way to ask a why question.
Product and event analytics6.5/10
No. 15
Amplitude
The deepest behavioural analysis on the list, with two million events a month for nothing.
Product and event analytics6.4/10
No. 16
Clicky
Nineteen years of real-time analytics, with heatmaps included at a price nobody else matches.
Platform-native and free6.4/10
No. 17
Piwik PRO
Enterprise analytics built for organisations whose lawyers read the contract first.
Enterprise suites6.4/10
No. 18
Ackee
A self-hosted analytics node you can deploy in an evening and forget about.
Open source and self-hosted6.3/10
No. 19
Statsig
An experimentation platform with analytics attached, rather than the other way round.
Product and event analytics6.3/10
No. 20
Microsoft Clarity
Heatmaps and session recordings at any traffic volume, for nothing, from Microsoft.
Heatmaps and session replay5.9/10
No. 21
Vercel Web Analytics
Analytics that ship with the deployment, for teams who already live in the Vercel dashboard.
Platform-native and free5.9/10
No. 22
Heap
Captures everything automatically, so you can answer questions you had not thought to instrument.
Product and event analytics5.8/10
No. 23
LogRocket
Session replay with the console, the network log and the Redux state attached.
Heatmaps and session replay5.8/10
No. 24
Contentsquare
The experience analytics roll-up that now owns Hotjar and Heap.
Enterprise suites5.7/10
No. 25
FullStory
Session replay for people who want to query sessions rather than watch them.
Heatmaps and session replay5.7/10
No. 26
Hotjar
The tool that taught a generation of marketers what a heatmap was, now inside Contentsquare.
Heatmaps and session replay5.6/10
No. 27
Smartlook
Session replay that treats mobile apps as a first-class citizen rather than an afterthought.
Heatmaps and session replay5.5/10
No. 28
Statcounter
The oldest tool on this list, still counting, still showing you individual visitor logs.
Platform-native and free5.3/10
No. 29
Adobe Analytics
The most powerful analytics on this list, sold the way enterprise software was sold in 2008.
Enterprise suites4.8/10
No. 30
Google Analytics 4
The default nobody chose, free at the point of use and expensive everywhere else.
Enterprise suites4.4/10
Head to head
The comparisons people actually search for
enough on their servers, or everything on yours
Plausible vs Matomo
Matomo is eighteen years old and does nearly everything Google Analytics does, on your own hardware, for nothing. Plausible is six years old, does.
Plausible Analytics 8.0 · Matomo 7.0
depth on one site, or fifty sites on one bill
Plausible vs Fathom
The two best-known names in cookieless analytics, both trading since before the category had a name, both delivering a single clean dashboard with no.
Plausible Analytics 8.0 · Fathom Analytics 7.4
the better tool, against the better default
Adobe Analytics vs Google Analytics 4
This is the enterprise decision, and it is unusual on this site because both answers are defensible and the losing one is not obviously worse. Adobe.
Adobe Analytics 4.8 · Google Analytics 4 4.4
the same depth, on very different terms
Google Analytics 4 vs Matomo
This is the closest feature-for-feature comparison on the list. Matomo has spent eighteen years being the thing you install when you want Google.
Google Analytics 4 4.4 · Matomo 7.0
the incumbent, against free at any volume
Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity
This comparison used to be straightforward and Microsoft changed it. Hotjar defined the heatmap-and-recording category and was the default purchase.
Hotjar 5.6 · Microsoft Clarity 5.9
clarity for everyone, or depth for an analyst
Mixpanel vs Amplitude
The closest fight on this list. Two mature product analytics platforms, founded three years apart, both with generous free tiers, both with unlimited.
Mixpanel 6.5 · Amplitude 6.4
Looking for a way out
Alternatives, by the tool you are leaving
Google Analytics alternatives
More people search for a way out of Google Analytics than for any other analytics question, and the reasons divide neatly into three. The interface.
Enterprise suites6 picks
Plausible alternatives
People look past Plausible for two reasons, and neither is that it is a bad product, because it is not. The first is heatmaps: Plausible does not.
Privacy-first and cookieless6 picks
Fathom Analytics alternatives
Two things send people looking past Fathom. The first is depth: there are no funnels, segmentation is shallow, there are no heatmaps and no session.
Privacy-first and cookieless6 picks
Matomo alternatives
Matomo is the most capable open-source analytics platform there is, and people look for alternatives for one reason far more often than any other.
Open source and self-hosted6 picks
Hotjar alternatives
Hotjar defined this category and three things now send people looking elsewhere. Microsoft Clarity does most of the same work for nothing at any.
Heatmaps and session replay6 picks
Microsoft Clarity alternatives
Clarity is free at any volume with no session cap, so nobody leaves it over price. They leave for two other reasons. The first is the consent banner.
Heatmaps and session replay6 picks