The short version. Plausible from $9 is the cleanest and the easiest to read. Simple Analytics has a free tier that keeps 30 days of history and does not cap your pageviews. Matomo is free forever if you host it yourself, which is the honest answer if your budget is zero. Fathom Analytics at $45 covers half a million pageviews, so it only makes sense once you have traffic. PostHog is a different product wearing the same coat, and its free tier is a million events a month.
Every price here came off the vendor’s own pricing page on 16 August 2026. Some are in euros because that is how the vendor lists them.
Running a site that earns from its content? Our directory keeps shortlists for content publishers, reviewed on a schedule.
What you are actually buying, since the free option is very good
Google Analytics is free and comprehensive, so it is worth being clear about what the money here buys. Two things, and only two.
You are buying your way out of a cookie banner. These tools do not use cookies and do not collect personal data, so in most jurisdictions you do not need consent to run them. That removes the banner, which removes the thing every visitor has to dismiss before reading anything, and it removes a compliance obligation you would otherwise be managing.
You are buying numbers you will actually look at. GA4 is built for teams doing conversion rate optimisation. If you are one person with a website, the reason you stopped opening it is not laziness. It is that the interface is designed around questions you do not have.
So we ranked on cost at realistic traffic, whether the free tier is a trial or a plan, and whether you can answer a question in under thirty seconds.
1. Plausible: the clearest, and the cheapest to start
Starter $9/month or $108 a year. Growth $14/month or $168 a year. Business $19/month or $228 a year. Those are the prices at up to 10,000 monthly pageviews and rise with volume. Enterprise is custom above 10 million. Annual billing is two months free. Verified 16 August 2026.
One page, everything on it. Visitors, sources, top pages, countries, devices, and a goal or two if you set them up. You can answer what happened last week in about ten seconds, which is the entire product and the reason people who switch to it stay.
The script is tiny, which matters more than it sounds. GA4 and its tag manager are a meaningful chunk of the JavaScript on a typical content page, and page speed is one of the few technical things that reliably affects both readers and rankings.
At $9 a month for a small site this is cheap enough that the decision is really about whether you want the banner gone, and it is also open source if you would rather host it yourself.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who needs funnels, cohorts or user-level analysis. Plausible is deliberately shallow, and that is the feature. If you need to know what an individual user did, you want PostHog.
2. Simple Analytics: the most usable free tier
Free forever with 30 days of history and unlimited pageviews under a fair use policy. Self-serve $20/month, priced on a usage slider covering roughly 100,000 to 2.5 million pageviews, with two months free on annual billing. Enterprise is quoted. Verified 16 August 2026.
The free tier is the reason this ranks second and it is unusual in the category. Most free analytics plans cap your traffic. This one caps your history at 30 days instead and leaves the pageviews alone under fair use.
For a lot of small sites that is the right trade. If you look at your numbers weekly and only care about the last month, you are giving up something you were never going to use, and you pay nothing.
The interface is close to Plausible’s in spirit, and the paid tier scales on a slider rather than in fixed steps, so the bill matches your actual traffic instead of jumping when you cross a threshold.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who needs year on year comparisons. Thirty days of history means no seasonal view at all on the free plan, and for a publisher that comparison is often the most useful number you have.
3. Matomo: free forever if you host it
Cloud from €29 a month at 50,000 to 100,000 monthly hits, rising with volume, and quoted above 10 million. On-Premise Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and unlimited hits. Paid on-premise bundles run from €230 a month. Verified 16 August 2026.
Matomo is the most complete product here and the only one with a genuinely free path. If you can run software on a server, the Community edition costs nothing, has no traffic ceiling, and keeps every byte of data on infrastructure you control.
That data ownership is the strongest privacy position available. Everything else on this page is a promise by a vendor about what they do with your visitors. This one removes the vendor.
The cloud pricing is where it gets less attractive. At €29 for 100,000 hits it is roughly three times Plausible’s entry point, and Matomo counts hits rather than pageviews, so the number is not directly comparable and usually runs higher than you expect.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who does not want to maintain software. Self-hosting means updates, backups and a database, and if that sentence sounds like work you should be looking at the two above.
4. Fathom Analytics: good, and priced for sites with traffic
Starter $45 a month covering up to 500,000 pageviews, with tiers at 100,000, 500,000, 2 million, 10 million and 25 million and above. Annual billing is two months free. Verified 16 August 2026.
Fathom is well built, fast, and has been doing privacy-first analytics longer than most. Its EU isolation option is genuinely useful for anyone whose obligations are strict about where visitor data is processed.
The reason it sits fourth is the entry price. Forty-five dollars a month is five times Plausible’s starting tier, and the value shows up at half a million pageviews rather than at ten thousand. If you have that traffic, the arithmetic is fine and it is competitive. If you do not, you are buying capacity you will not use for years.
Worth noting that this is a different product from the meeting notetaker with a similar name, which trips people up regularly.
Who it is wrong for: small sites. There is no cheap tier here, and the alternatives are meaningfully cheaper below a few hundred thousand pageviews.
5. PostHog: not really the same category
Usage-based with a monthly free tier that resets: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session replays, 1 million feature flag requests, 1,500 survey responses and 100,000 error tracking exceptions. Beyond that, analytics is $0.00005 per event, session replay $0.005 per recording, surveys $0.10 per response. Verified 16 August 2026.
PostHog is here because a million events a month free is more generous than anything else on this page, and because plenty of people arrive at this comparison who actually want what it does.
It is product analytics rather than website analytics. Session replay, feature flags, funnels and surveys, aimed at understanding what users do inside an application. For a publisher that is mostly overkill. For anyone running a product alongside their site, it replaces three tools.
It is not a way to avoid a cookie banner. PostHog identifies users and stores personal data by design, which is the whole point of it, and that means consent applies in the way it always did. If banner removal is why you are reading this, the four above are the answer and this is not.
Who it is wrong for: anyone who came here for privacy. Read that paragraph twice before installing it in place of GA4 and assuming the compliance question went away.
Sites this list will not help
Ecommerce stores. You need revenue attribution and checkout funnels, and your platform’s own analytics plus something like Triple Whale will serve you better.
Large marketing teams. Your reporting has to reconcile with paid media, which none of these do.
Anyone required to use GA4. Some ad partners and networks require it. That decision is made for you.
Anyone who will not look at the numbers. Switching tools does not create the habit. If you have not opened GA4 in a year, the problem was never the interface, and $9 a month will not fix it.
Considered, and left off
Google Analytics. Free, powerful and the reason this category exists. If the banner does not bother you and you can navigate GA4, you do not need to spend anything.
Umami. Open source, self-hostable and well regarded, with a cloud plan. Its pricing page did not render for us on 16 August 2026, so we have not ranked it.
Cloudflare Web Analytics. Free, privacy-friendly and already available if your site sits behind Cloudflare. Check before paying for anything here.
The AI analytics assistants. Tools that answer questions about your traffic in plain English. Genuinely useful once you have enough traffic for a question to be interesting, and mostly noise below that.
Questions publishers ask us
Do these really let me remove the cookie banner?
Plausible, Simple Analytics, Matomo and Fathom are built not to use cookies or collect personal data, which in most jurisdictions removes the consent requirement for analytics specifically. It does not remove it for anything else you load, so if you also run ad pixels or embedded video, the banner stays. Check your own obligations rather than taking a vendor’s word for it.
What is the cheapest option that is not free?
Plausible at $9 a month for a small site. Below that, Simple Analytics is free with 30 days of history, and Matomo Community is free forever if you can host it.
Why is Fathom five times the price of Plausible?
Because its cheapest tier assumes half a million pageviews. It is not more expensive for the same thing, it is priced for a bigger site. At 500,000 pageviews the comparison is much closer.
Is self-hosting Matomo worth it?
If you already run a server, yes, and it is the only genuinely free option with no traffic ceiling. If you do not, the maintenance will cost you more than €29 a month in time, and you will resent it during the first upgrade.
Can I use PostHog instead of GA4 for privacy reasons?
No. PostHog identifies users and stores personal data, which is what makes it useful and what keeps you inside the consent regime. It is an excellent product analytics tool and it is not a privacy play.
Will I lose data by switching?
Your history stays in GA4 and does not come with you, so run both for a month before you turn anything off. Also expect the numbers to disagree. These tools count differently and block less, so most sites see higher visitor counts after switching, which is usually more accurate rather than less.
See our maintained directory shortlists for content publishers, including tools for tracking whether AI engines cite your work.
Last reviewed: 16 August 2026. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on that date. Umami is unranked because its pricing did not render for us. Nothing here is legal advice, and whether you need a consent banner depends on everything else your site loads. We review this page quarterly.
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