Google Analytics is free, and you pay for it anyway: a cookie-consent banner on every page, sampled reports once traffic gets interesting, and every visitor's behavioral data stored on Google's servers. Several EU data-protection authorities have ruled Google Analytics transfers non-compliant, and the upgrade path (Analytics 360) has no public price at all - it is contact-sales enterprise licensing.
So I compared the best Google Analytics alternatives available in 2026: what each one costs, what it caps, and who owns the data. Every price below was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026, not a roundup blog.
At a glance: which one to pick
Short on time? Here is the verdict before the details.
- Best overall: Umami, self-hosted. Open source (MIT), cookieless, no pageview caps, full REST API, and your data in a Postgres database you own. I run it for my own site's traffic for a flat $7/mo.
- Best hosted option: Plausible. Open source with a polished EU-hosted cloud, from $9/mo for 10k pageviews.
- Most GA-like features: Matomo. Heatmaps, funnels, a GA-style UI. Cloud from EUR 29/mo, or free self-hosted if you want to run PHP + MySQL yourself.
- Zero-budget pick: Counter. Free, pay-what-you-want, deliberately minimal.
| Tool | Price | Pageview limit | Open source | Cookieless | Who holds the data |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Umami (self-hosted) | $7/mo flat | None | Yes (MIT) | Yes | You |
| Plausible | From $9/mo | 10k/mo on Starter | Yes (AGPL) | Yes | Plausible (EU) |
| Fathom | From $15/mo | 100k/mo entry tier | No | Yes | Fathom |
| Matomo | Cloud from EUR 29/mo, self-host free | 50k hits/mo on Cloud Starter | Yes (GPL) | Configurable | You (self-host) or Matomo |
| Simple Analytics | From $20/mo | 100k/mo entry tier | No (proprietary) | Yes | Simple Analytics (EU) |
| Counter | Free / pay what you want | None stated | Yes (AGPL) | Yes | Counter (or you) |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free (360 is contact-sales) | Sampling on busy sites | No | No - consent banner needed |
The short version: if you want to stop renting your analytics, self-host Umami and pay a flat rate forever regardless of traffic. If you want someone else to run it, Plausible is the nicest hosted option. The rest of this guide goes tool by tool.
1. Umami: the self-hosted default ($7/mo flat, no caps)
Umami is the open-source web analytics platform most self-hosters land on, and it is what I run for my own traffic. Around 37,000 GitHub stars, MIT licensed, and built to answer the questions most sites have: how many people came, where from, and what did they look at?
What you get: A clean single-page dashboard with pageviews, unique visitors, referrers, UTM campaigns, top pages, countries, browsers, and devices. Every event is counted, never sampled. The tracking script is about 2KB against the ~45KB of Google's gtag.js, and it sets no cookies, so in most jurisdictions you can drop the consent banner entirely.
The API is included, not gated. Self-hosted Umami ships a full REST API: log in for a bearer token, then pull your stats as JSON from your own instance. Plausible gates its stats API behind the $19/mo Business tier; with Umami it is yours from day one.
The pricing: This is the part that separates self-hosting from every hosted tool on this list. Hosted analytics is priced by traffic, so a good month for your site is a bad month for your bill. I run Umami on a $7/mo pod on InstaPods - 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 25GB storage, a bundled PostgreSQL database, HTTPS, and daily backups included. Go viral and the price does not move.
What it doesn't do: Umami is not an ad-attribution suite. If your business lives inside Google Ads and you need deep campaign attribution, GA4 is hard to replace - here is the honest breakdown in Umami vs Google Analytics. Umami Cloud also exists as a hosted option if you want one, but at that point you are back to comparing hosted plans, and the self-hosted version is the one with no meter.
Setup: The old blocker was that self-hosting meant Docker, a database, a reverse proxy, and TLS by hand. Deploying it as a real Linux server is now one click and about 30 seconds, with a per-instance admin password rotated for you. The full walkthrough is in Self-Host Umami.
2. Plausible: the best hosted option (from $9/mo)
Plausible is the tool that made privacy-first analytics mainstream. It is open source (AGPL), EU-hosted, cookieless, and the dashboard is genuinely lovely - a single page you can read in ten seconds.
The pricing: Starter is $9/mo for 10k monthly pageviews and 1 site. Growth is $14/mo and adds team members and up to 3 sites. Business is $19/mo for up to 10 sites, and it is the tier where the stats API, funnels, custom properties, and ecommerce revenue attribution live. All tiers are traffic-priced, so the bill steps up as your pageviews grow.
Where it wins: If you do not want to run anything, Plausible Cloud is the best-run hosted option on this list. EU data residency, a public roadmap, and a team that has been consistently good on privacy for years.
Where it loses: The 10k-pageview entry tier is small - one post doing well on Hacker News can eat a month's quota. And the API being a Business-tier feature stings when Umami includes it self-hosted. The full head-to-head is here: Umami vs Plausible.
3. Fathom: polished but closed and cloud-only (from $15/mo)
Fathom is a polished, cookieless analytics tool with strong GDPR positioning and EU traffic isolation. It deserves its reputation for simplicity.
The pricing: Entry is $15/mo for up to 100k pageviews, rising with traffic ($45/mo at the 500k tier). Every plan includes 50 sites. There is no free tier.
The catch: Fathom is closed-source and cloud-only. There is no self-hosted version, so your analytics data always lives on Fathom's servers, and there is no exit to running it yourself later. If that trade is fine for you, it is a good tool; if data ownership is the reason you are leaving Google, it only gets you halfway. Comparison here: Umami vs Fathom.
4. Matomo: the feature-complete heavyweight (cloud from EUR 29/mo)
Matomo (formerly Piwik) is the oldest tool on this list and the closest to Google Analytics in scope: funnels, heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, and a UI that GA refugees will find familiar.
The pricing: Matomo Cloud starts at EUR 29/mo for 50k hits. Matomo On-Premise is free and unlimited - you run it yourself on PHP + MySQL - with paid plugin bundles (Team from EUR 275/mo) for organizations that want the premium features supported.
Where it wins: If you need GA-parity features - real funnels, heatmaps, per-user journeys - Matomo has them and most of the lightweight tools do not.
Where it loses: Weight and upkeep. Self-hosting Matomo means maintaining a PHP application and its database, and the interface carries the same complexity GA does. If your questions are "how many visitors, from where, reading what", Matomo is more machine than you need.
5. Simple Analytics: privacy-first from the EU (from $20/mo)
Simple Analytics is a Dutch, privacy-first tool with a genuinely simple dashboard and a strong stance on tracking (no cookies, no fingerprinting).
The pricing: The paid plan starts at $20/mo for around 100k pageviews, scaling with traffic. There is a free plan, but it comes with real limits: a required badge on your site and only 1 month of history, which makes it a demo rather than an analytics record.
The verdict: A likable tool with the same structural issue as Fathom - proprietary and hosted-only, priced above Plausible for a similar job.
6. Counter: the zero-budget pick (free)
Counter is web analytics stripped to the studs: daily unique visitors, referrers, and geography, with no cookies, no logging, and no IP fingerprinting. It is open source (AGPL-3) and the hosted version is free - the pricing model is literally "start paying whenever you want."
The verdict: For a side project where you want a rough sense of traffic at $0, Counter is great. It does not track per-page performance over time the way the tools above do, so most sites outgrow it. When you do, the flat-price self-hosted option is the natural next step.
How to choose
Three questions settle it:
- Do you need Google Ads attribution? Then stay on GA4 for attribution and consider running a privacy-first tool alongside it for clean traffic numbers.
- Do you want to own the data? Only two tools here give you that fully: self-hosted Umami and self-hosted Matomo. Umami is the lighter, simpler one, and at $7/mo it costs less than every hosted plan here.
- Do you want zero ops? Plausible at $9/mo is the best hosted option, with the caveat that price scales with your traffic and the API costs $19/mo.
The math worth noticing: at 100k pageviews/mo you would pay Fathom $15, Simple Analytics $20, and Plausible $19 (their 10k Starter does not cover it). Self-hosted Umami is $7 at 100k pageviews, and still $7 at a million.
I put the full write-up with every vendor link on my site: 6 Best Google Analytics Alternatives in 2026. If self-hosted Umami sounds right, it is one click to deploy - about 30 seconds from click to dashboard, cookieless from the first pageview.
What are you running for analytics in 2026, and did privacy or price push you off GA? Curious what everyone landed on.
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