Absolutely Analytics

The verdict

Absolutely Analytics is the tool I would install on a site today if I wanted useful numbers by lunchtime and no legal conversation afterwards. It is a hosted, cookieless analytics product whose whole design argument is that it cannot identify your visitors even if someone asks it to, and that argument is made in the architecture rather than in a policy document.

The mechanism is worth stating plainly because it is the thing the rest of the product hangs off. An arriving request is hashed with a salt that rotates every day, and the IP address and user agent that went into that hash are discarded before the response is sent. What is kept is an opaque token scoped to one site for one day. Yesterday's salt cannot be recomputed, so yesterday's visitors cannot be joined to today's. Cross-day tracking is not switched off by a setting here, it is arithmetically unavailable, and that is a materially different promise from a checkbox in a preferences panel. Plausible and Fathom use daily-rotating salts too, so this is not unique. What is unusual is how much of the rest of the product follows from it.

What you actually get

Three things separate it from the rest of the cookieless field, and all three are checkable on its own published pages.

The first is the meter. Bots, headless browsers, datacentre scrapers and link previews are filtered before anything is counted, which its ingest panel puts at roughly 30 per cent of raw arrivals on a typical site. Because the filter runs before the counter, that traffic never reaches the dashboard and never reaches the bill. Tools that meter raw hits charge you for all of it. The second is that click, scroll and attention maps are included from the Growth tier at $14 a month rather than sold as a separate product, which is the single biggest practical difference between this and Plausible, whose ladder is otherwise identical to the penny. The third is session replay, offered as an add-on from $19 a month, where every input, textarea and contenteditable element is masked in the browser before the recording is transmitted. Not redacted on arrival: never sent. You opt individual fields back in with a data attribute rather than opting sensitive ones out, which is the right way round.

The dashboard itself is deliberately narrow. Unique visitors, pageviews, time on page, sources, top pages, geography, goals and segments, with funnels, user journeys, custom properties and the Stats API held back for the $19 Business tier. If you want a hundred reports you will not open, this is not the product. If you want the three numbers that decide what you write next, it puts them on one screen.

Getting it running

One script tag in the head, 1,270 bytes gzipped, no npm package and no build step. There is a Google Analytics importer for historic data and a Search Console integration on every tier. The first pageview lands before you have switched tabs.

What to watch out for

There is no free tier, which rules it out for hobby projects where Umami or Microsoft Clarity would do. The allowance counts custom events against the same meter as pageviews, so an event-heavy app climbs the rungs faster than the pageview figure suggests, and the same is true of Fathom and Pirsch. It has no A/B testing, no feature flags and no experimentation, which is the whole reason PostHog exists. There is no first-party mobile SDK. And it is a young company with a short public track record next to Matomo's eighteen years, which is a real risk and not one I can score away.

Pricing and practicalities

Eight published volume rungs from 10,000 to 10,000,000 pageviews and events a month, three tiers at each rung, and no negotiation below 10M. Retention is three years on Starter and Growth, five on Business. Sites and seats scale 1/3/10 across the tiers. Annual billing takes two months off. Prices read 2026-09-11.

Who should go elsewhere

Teams who need feature flags and experiments in the same tool as their analytics, who should read PostHog instead. It is also the wrong answer if your budget is genuinely zero, where Microsoft Clarity gives you heatmaps and replay for nothing, at a privacy cost this tool exists to avoid.

How it compares

The closest comparison on this list is Plausible Analytics, whose price ladder matches it rung for rung and tier for tier, and which loses the comparison on heatmaps, replay and overage conduct rather than on price. Against Fathom Analytics the gap is conduct: Fathom emails at 30 per cent over and locks the account on day seven, where this one keeps collecting and moves you up a rung only after three consecutive months.

The ten measures

Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.

• Insight quality ×39
• Privacy architecture ×210
• Value for money ×28
• Setup and time to data ×1.510
• Script weight ×1.510
• Analytical depth ×16
• Behaviour tooling ×18
• Data ownership ×17
• Accuracy ×19
• Vendor conduct ×110

What this rests on

This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.