Alternatives · 2026
Ranked, scored and explained. What each one does better, what you give up, and when staying put is the right call.
Simple Analytics is a good product with a pricing structure that sends people looking. Twenty dollars a month for a hundred thousand pageviews and one user, with every additional user costing another twenty, is expensive against a category where the entry price is six to nine dollars and seats come included. There are no heatmaps, no session replay and no funnels at the self-serve tier.
Its free tier is a hobby offer rather than a business one: five sites, one month of history, and a required visible badge.
When to stay put. Keep Simple Analytics if you are buying it for the job its enterprise tier is built for, which is running cookieless measurement beside a consent-gated suite to quantify what your banner costs you, with warehouse export, Looker Studio, SSO and SOC 2. Almost nothing else in this category is set up to be a data layer rather than a replacement, and its customer list suggests that is what people actually use it for.
| Tool | From | Free tier | Cookies | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible Analytics | £9 per month | No, but the community edition is free to self-host | None, so no consent banner | 8.0 |
| Absolutely Analytics | $9 per month | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | None, so no consent banner | 8.9 |
| Pirsch Analytics | $6 per month | No. A 30-day trial, no card required | None, so no consent banner | 7.5 |
| Fathom Analytics | $15 per month | No. A 7-day trial | None, so no consent banner | 7.4 |
| Umami | Free self-hosted and on cloud Hobby | Yes, 100,000 events a month on hosted cloud, plus free self-hosting | None | 7.5 |
| Piwik PRO | Free core tier, then quoted | Yes, a Core tier with a monthly action limit | Optional, and it runs cookieless if you configure it to | 6.4 |
The straightforward upgrade. £9 against $20, three seats on the £14 tier, and funnels, user journeys, custom properties and a Stats API on the £19 tier. More product, less money, same cookieless guarantees.
From £9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The answer if you want behaviour tooling too. Same cookieless architecture, click and scroll maps from $14, masked session replay as an add-on, and bot filtering that runs before the meter.
From $9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The value answer. Six dollars for 10,000 pageviews, fifty sites and unlimited team members, which directly solves the per-seat problem. Check its five-day collection cutoff before committing.
From $6 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The portfolio answer, at $15 with fifty sites included. Comparable simplicity to Simple Analytics with a much better per-site cost, though its overage policy is the harshest here.
From $15 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The free answer. 100,000 events a month hosted for nothing with no badge, or self-host under MIT for nothing at all, which is a different proposition from a one-month-history hobby tier.
From Free self-hosted and on cloud Hobby. None. Full review →
The answer if the compliance job was the point and you need more than a cookieless dashboard: consent management, a CDP and on-premise hosting, at enterprise pricing.
From Free core tier, then quoted. Optional, and it runs cookieless if you configure it to. Full review →
Two reasons. Its entry plan starts at 100,000 pageviews rather than 10,000, so the headline is not comparable to a $9 tier at a tenth of the volume. And it charges $20 per additional user where most rivals include seats by tier, which is what makes it expensive for teams rather than individuals.
Pirsch includes unlimited members on its $6 plan. Plausible includes three on Growth and ten on Business. Absolutely Analytics includes three and ten on the same tiers. Fathom does not charge per seat either.
Absolutely Analytics includes click, scroll and attention maps from $14. Matomo includes heatmaps and can run cookieless. Plausible, Fathom and Pirsch offer none, which means a second subscription and, usually, the consent banner back.
Not as a product pitch, which is Simple Analytics' genuine differentiator. You can approximate it with any cookieless tool by running it alongside your consented suite and comparing the two figures, which is worth doing whatever you buy.
These are desk reviews and the ordering reflects my own weighted scoring, which is published in full. There are no affiliate links on this page and no vendor has paid to appear on it. Read the full Simple Analytics review, or send me a correction.