Head to head
Absolutely Analytics vs Matomo
Nothing to operate, or nothing to pay. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Absolutely Analytics
8.9/10
No. 1 of 30
Matomo
7.0/10
No. 8 of 30
This is the clearest trade on the whole list and the one where the right answer genuinely depends on your organisation rather than your taste. Matomo, self-hosted, costs nothing and puts every raw event on hardware you control. It is the only tool here that scores a ten for data ownership. It has been going since 2007, which makes it eighteen years old and considerably more established than anything in the cookieless category.
Absolutely Analytics costs nine dollars and there is nothing to operate. No PHP, no MySQL, no archiving cron jobs that get slower as the database grows, no patching, no capacity planning when a post does well.
The verdict
It depends, and the deciding question is not about analytics at all: it is whether somebody in your organisation will actually operate a PHP and MySQL application in production, indefinitely.
If the answer is yes, and particularly if you have a regulatory reason the data must not leave your infrastructure, take Matomo. It is more capable than Absolutely Analytics on depth, with funnels, user flows, A/B testing, roll-up reporting and multi-channel attribution, and self-hosting it costs nothing but time.
If the answer is no, or it is yes today and nobody is sure about next year, take Absolutely Analytics. The failure mode for self-hosted Matomo is not dramatic: the archiving job quietly stops keeping up, the dashboard goes stale, nobody notices for a quarter, and the organisation concludes that open source was not ready. Matomo Cloud removes the operations but costs twenty-two euros for fifty thousand hits, which is more than twice the price for a metering unit that counts events as hits, and its heatmap allowance of 1,500 pageviews a month is a taster rather than a tool.
Side by side
| Absolutely Analytics | Matomo | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 8.9 / 10 | 7.0 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 1 of 30 | No. 8 of 30 |
| From | $9 per month | Free self-hosted; cloud from €22 |
| What that buys | 10,000 pageviews and custom events a month, rising in eight published rungs to 10M | On-premise is free; Matomo Cloud starts at €22 a month for 50,000 hits |
| Free tier | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | Yes, the entire on-premise product |
| Cookies | None, so no consent banner | Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured |
| Script size | 1,270 bytes gzipped | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | Hosted, with a choice of storage jurisdiction | Your own servers, or EU cloud |
| Trading since | 2024 | 2007, as Piwik |
| Price | $9/mo hosted, nothing to run | Free self-hosted; Cloud from €22/mo at 50k hits |
| What you operate | Nothing | PHP, MySQL, archiving jobs, patching, backups |
| Data ownership | Hosted, with a choice of jurisdiction | Total, on your own hardware |
| Heatmaps | Included from $14, no cap named | Cloud: 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 recordings a month |
| Metering unit | Pageviews and custom events | Hits, which counts events too |
| Analytical depth | Funnels and Stats API on Business | Funnels, flows, A/B testing, attribution, roll-ups |
| Track record | Since 2024 | Since 2007, as Piwik |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Absolutely Analytics | Matomo |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 9 | 8 |
| Privacy architecture | 10 | 8 |
| Value for money | 8 | 7 |
| Setup and time to data | 10 | 4 |
| Script weight | 10 | 3 |
| Analytical depth | 6 | 9 |
| Behaviour tooling | 8 | 7 |
| Data ownership | 7 | 10 |
| Accuracy | 9 | 7 |
| Vendor conduct | 10 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 8.9 | 7.0 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose Matomo if
The data must stay on your infrastructure, and somebody will genuinely keep a PHP and MySQL application patched and archiving properly.
Choose Absolutely Analytics if
Nobody wants to operate an analytics server, and you would rather spend nine dollars than a day a quarter.
Common questions
Is Matomo really free?
The on-premise version is free software under the GPL. Running it is not free: you provide the server, the database, the patching and the archiving configuration, and performance degrades noticeably if archiving is left unconfigured as data grows. Matomo Cloud removes that work and starts at €22 a month for 50,000 hits.
Which has better heatmaps?
Absolutely Analytics, on allowance rather than capability. Its click, scroll and attention maps are included from the $14 tier. Matomo Cloud's heatmap allowance is 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 session recordings a month, which on any real site is a sample rather than a tool.
Does Matomo need a cookie banner?
Not necessarily. Matomo can be configured to run without cookies and with IP anonymisation, in which case many jurisdictions treat it as exempt. That is configuration you have to get right, whereas Absolutely Analytics has no cookie mode to switch off because it never had one.
What does Matomo mean by hits?
A hit is any tracked request, which includes pageviews, events, downloads and outlinks. An event-heavy site therefore consumes its Matomo allowance faster than its pageview count suggests, and additional hits are charged at €2.20 per 5,000.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for Absolutely Analytics and Matomo, or tell me where I have got something wrong.