There are more good web analytics tools than ever, and most of them do the basics well: visitors, pages, sources, countries, devices. What separates them is price at your traffic, how they treat privacy, where your data lives, and a handful of features you either need or never touch. Answer these five questions and the list gets short.
1. How much traffic, on how many websites?
Price depends on your monthly pageviews and, for many tools, on the number of websites. The differences are large: at 1 million pageviews a month the cheapest tool on our comparison costs $19.99 and the most expensive $445 (see the price study).
- Small sites can often stay free. WireBoard is free up to 50,000 pageviews on 2 websites; Clicky, Umami, PostHog, Cloudflare Web Analytics and GoatCounter also have free plans, each with different limits.
- Several websites (an agency, a portfolio of side projects): look for plans that include many sites. WireBoard includes 50 websites from $9 a month, Fathom and Pirsch's Standard plan 50, and Seline counts all your sites against one shared limit. Tools that bill per website, such as TWIPLA and Statcounter, add up quickly.
Put your own numbers into the price calculator to see every tool ranked.
2. Do you want to avoid a cookie banner?
In the EU, analytics that sets cookies or reads information from the visitor's device generally needs consent, which means a banner and visitors who decline, missing from your numbers. Many tools now work without cookies, and are usually used without asking for consent. Our guide to cookie banners for analytics explains when that holds.
Tools built to work without cookies include Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Simple Analytics, Pirsch, GoatCounter, Rybbit, Seline, Swetrix and TWIPLA. WireBoard, Matomo and PostHog use cookies by default and offer a cookieless mode, so you can start without cookies and turn them on for visitors who accept them.
3. Where should the data be stored?
If you or your customers prefer data kept in Europe, many tools host only in the EU:
| Data hosted in | Tools |
|---|---|
| Germany or Finland | WireBoard, Plausible, Pirsch, Rybbit, Seline, Swetrix, GoatCounter, TWIPLA, Matomo Cloud |
| Netherlands or Sweden | Simple Analytics (Netherlands), Piwik PRO Business (Sweden) |
| Your choice of US or EU | Umami Cloud, PostHog |
| United States | Fathom (EU visitors are anonymised in the EU first), Clicky, GoSquared |
The company behind the tool matters too: it decides which laws apply to it. Every tool's page on this site lists both the hosting and the company's country.
4. Hosted, or on your own server?
Self-hosting keeps every byte on infrastructure you control and can be cheaper at very high traffic. It also means installing updates, keeping the server secure and backing up the database. The open-source tools you can run yourself are Matomo, Plausible (Community Edition), Umami, Rybbit, Swetrix (Community Edition), PostHog and GoatCounter. Some self-hosted editions leave out features of the paid cloud versions, so compare the two before deciding.
If you do not have someone who enjoys running servers, a hosted plan is usually the better deal.
5. Which reports do you really need?
- Traffic overview: every tool covers visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries and devices.
- Seeing visitors as they arrive: useful for launches, campaigns and live events. WireBoard, Clicky (paid plans), GoSquared, TWIPLA, Matomo, Umami, Rybbit, Seline, PostHog and Statcounter show current visitors within seconds. Others update every 30 seconds to several minutes, which is fine for daily reporting.
- Campaigns, goals and funnels: most tools track UTM campaigns and custom events; funnels and revenue are on fewer tools or on higher plans. Check the tool's page before you commit.
- Product analytics, session recordings, heatmaps: tools such as PostHog, Matomo and Piwik PRO go far beyond traffic reports. You pay for that depth in price or complexity.
Our suggestion: test two
Shortlist two tools from the answers above, install both for two weeks, and keep the one whose dashboard you actually open. Most have a free plan or a trial, and running two scripts for a fortnight costs nothing. If you are coming from Google Analytics, follow the switching guide so you keep your history.