I spent the last 6 months deep in web analytics while building my own platform. Along the way I tested GA4, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Plausible, Fathom, PostHog, and Matomo.
Every single one forces you into a tradeoff that shouldn't exist. Here's the short version.
GA4 — Free, but requires a certification to find basic data. Filtering for a single page takes 6 clicks. Reports are sampled above 10M events with error rates up to 30%. Cookie consent banners make 40-60% of your EU traffic invisible. The "free" tool effectively requires BigQuery for anything useful.
Hotjar — Great heatmaps, but the script adds ~830ms to your page load and ~0.5MB to page weight. The free plan records 35 sessions per day. Full Business tier across all products costs $922/mo. Session recordings break on Next.js and React apps when CSS filenames change between deploys.
Mixpanel — Powerful product analytics, but 10M events/month costs ~$2,500/mo. One HN user reported getting downgraded from 20M free events to 10K when switching to a paid plan. Client-side tracking loses 30-50% of users to ad blockers per their own docs.
Amplitude — Similar power, similar problems. Growth plan starts at ~$30K/year. The UI has so many options that teams spend more time navigating the tool than getting insights. Requires 25K+ monthly users minimum for accurate advanced analytics.
Plausible — Beautiful and simple. But resets visitor identity daily, so one person visiting 5 days counts as 5 uniques. No heatmaps, no session replay, no funnels on the self-hosted version. Self-hosted also lacks the bot detection the cloud version uses — one dev saw their stats jump from 200 to 5,000 visitors/day after switching.
Fathom — Clean and privacy-first. But custom events can't send metadata. No goal attribution with UTM parameters. No funnels, no entry/exit pages, no scroll depth. Completely closed-source with no self-hosting option. Shows you what happened, never why.
PostHog — Tries to do everything. The JS SDK is 52KB+. Self-hosting requires ClickHouse, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, Zookeeper, and MinIO running simultaneously. One dev ran up a $10K bill in half a day. Another needed 64GB RAM and still couldn't get it working.
Matomo — The oldest open-source option. MySQL-based architecture means reports can take hours to generate. UI barely evolved in 10+ years. Heatmaps, session replay, funnels, and A/B testing are all premium plugins at €1,200+/year even for self-hosted.
The pattern nobody talks about:
Every tool falls into one of two camps. Simple counters (Plausible, Fathom) that show what happened but not why. Or enterprise platforms (GA4, Amplitude, PostHog) that can answer deep questions but require weeks of learning and dedicated engineering.
Nothing sits in the middle: simple to start, powerful when you need it, privacy-first without sacrificing conversion tracking.
That gap is exactly why I built Zenovay. One dashboard with analytics, heatmaps, session replay, AI insights, and revenue attribution. No cookies. EU-hosted. $20/mo.
Not saying it's perfect yet. But the tradeoff between simple and powerful shouldn't be a tradeoff at all.
What analytics tool are you currently using, and what's the one thing that frustrates you most about it?
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