No. 11 of 30 · Privacy-first and cookieless
Simple Analytics
Dutch, cookieless, and unusually good at telling you how much traffic everyone else is missing.
Its enterprise pitch is recovering the 20 to 60 per cent of traffic that consent banners and ad blockers hide from other tools.
The verdict
Simple Analytics is a cookieless, EU-hosted analytics product with a sharper commercial idea than most of its peers: it sells itself as the tool that shows you the traffic your other tools cannot see. That framing is not marketing decoration. If your main analytics sits behind a consent banner, a substantial share of your visitors never get counted at all, and the size of that gap is a question most site owners have never been able to answer.
The dashboard is one page, deliberately, and the company has held that line for seven years. Its published customer list runs to Bloomberg, Michelin, GOV.UK and the Bank of England, which for a product at this price is an unusual set of names and says something about how the compliance conversation goes.
What you actually get
The pricing is where it becomes hard to recommend for small sites. Twenty dollars a month buys 100,000 pageviews and one user, and each additional user is another twenty dollars. At the same volume Fathom is $15 with fifty sites, Plausible is £9 with one, and Pirsch is under ten dollars with fifty. For a solo operator that is a straightforward loss on value, which is what the 5 reflects.
Where the money starts to make sense is the case the enterprise tier is built for: a marketing team that needs a second, uncookied measurement layer running alongside GA4 or Adobe to quantify what consent is costing them, with raw data export into a warehouse, Looker Studio, SSO and SOC 2 to satisfy procurement. That is a real job, several of the named customers are plainly doing it, and almost nothing else in the cookieless field is set up to be a data layer rather than a replacement. There is a free tier for hobby sites: five websites, one month of history, and a required badge.
Best for
Marketing and compliance teams who need a cookieless second opinion running beside a consent-gated enterprise suite, and who care more about the size of the measurement gap than about the price per site.
Getting it running
One script tag of roughly three kilobytes, with a documented proxy option for serving it first-party. There are integrations for the usual site builders and a documented path into Looker Studio.
What to watch out for
Twenty dollars per extra user adds up fast on a team of five, and the entry price is high for what a solo site owner gets. No heatmaps and no session replay. The free tier requires a visible badge and keeps only one month of history, so it is a hobby option rather than a business one.
Pricing and practicalities
From $20 a month for 100,000 pageviews on the self-serve tier, scaling to 2.5M, with annual billing taking two months off. One user included, extra users $20 each. A separate enterprise tier with SSO, SOC 2, raw export and manual invoicing. Prices read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Solo site owners and small teams on price alone, who get more for less from Pirsch Analytics or Plausible Analytics. It is also not the tool if you want behaviour insight, where Microsoft Clarity costs nothing and answers a question this cannot.
How it compares
Against Plausible Analytics it is the weaker product at more than twice the money for a single site, and the case for it is the enterprise data-layer job rather than the dashboard. Against Absolutely Analytics it matches the cookieless architecture but not the heatmaps, the bot filtering or the price.
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.
What this rests on
Simple Analytics' own pricing page and feature comparison, read 2026-09-11; its published enterprise capability list and customer logos; its documentation on the free plan's badge and retention terms.
Desk research against the vendor's published pricing and marketing pages. The traffic-recovery figure of 20 to 60 per cent is the vendor's own published claim and I have not independently verified it; treat it as a vendor estimate rather than a measured result.
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.