Google Analytics Alternatives, Honestly Reviewed

GA4 lost me. Not because it's bad software, exactly, but because it turned a simple task (how many people visited my site this week?) into something that required clicking through three different reports. The old Universal Analytics was fine. GA4 feels like it was designed for a data team at a mid-size company, not someone checking stats on their lunch break.

So I went looking. Tried a bunch of things over a few weeks. Here's what I actually think about each one.

Plausible

Plausible set the bar. The dashboard is a single page. You open it, you see your numbers, you close it. That sounds like nothing but after GA4 it felt like a revelation.

It's open source, EU-based, no cookies. Hosted plans start at $9/month for 10K pageviews. Self-hosting is an option too, though the Clickhouse-based setup wants at least 4GB of RAM, so "free" still means a decent VPS bill.

The main thing to know about Plausible is that it prices by total pageviews across all your sites. If you're running one medium-traffic site, great. If you're running a dozen small ones, you're paying for the combined total and it adds up fast.

Fathom

Similar vibe. Privacy-focused, clean, no cookies. Fathom's been around a bit longer and feels very stable. Starts at $15/month.

They have email reports and uptime monitoring baked in, which is a nice touch. The dashboard is slightly more opinionated than Plausible's — fewer filtering options, fewer knobs to turn. Whether that's a feature or a limitation depends on what you're after.

Between Plausible and Fathom on pure product quality it's close. Fathom costs more. Plausible is more customizable. Both are good at what they do.

Umami

The self-hosted option. Umami is open source and free to run on your own server. They have a cloud version now too, but the self-hosted setup is the main draw.

The catch is that you're running a Node.js app and a database. Updates, backups, monitoring uptime. It works well when it works, but you're taking on ops work that hosted tools handle for you. Good deal if you enjoy tinkering with servers. Less good if you want to set it and forget it.

Simple Analytics

Interesting approach — they can work with server-side data, so no tracking script needed for some setups. Based in the Netherlands, very privacy-focused. Starts at $9/month.

Dashboard is minimal. Less customizable than most of the others on this list. Clean though.

Matomo

The enterprise-ish option. Matomo (formerly Piwik) tries to be a full GA replacement, and it mostly gets there. Tag manager, heatmaps, A/B testing, session recordings, the works.

The tradeoff is complexity. Self-hosted Matomo is its own little production system. If you need all those enterprise features and want to own the data, it's the only real option. If you left GA4 because it felt overcomplicated, Matomo probably isn't the direction to go.

tinystat

Full disclosure: you're reading this on the tinystat blog. But here's the honest pitch.

tinystat is built around a different idea than most of the tools above. Instead of starting with a full analytics suite and stripping it down, we started with the smallest useful thing — pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, devices — and kept it there.

The tracking script is under 1KB. No cookies. Dashboard loads in under a second. The free tier gets you 1,000 pageviews/month on one site, which is plenty for a personal site or side project. Starter ($5/month) covers up to 5 sites and 10K pageviews. Pro ($12/month) handles 10 sites and 100K. And if you need more, the Executive tier ($29/month) is unlimited on everything.

Where tinystat really stands out is the dashboard. It's designed to give you everything at a glance — no clicking through reports, no navigating between screens. Open it, see your numbers, done. Every tool on this list claims to be simple, but tinystat takes that further than anyone else.

It won't replace Plausible or Fathom if you need goals, funnels, or custom event properties. But for the question most people are actually asking — "is anyone visiting my site, and where are they coming from?" — it's the fastest way to get an answer.

How to pick

It depends on two things: what data you actually look at, and how many sites you're tracking.

If you need conversion funnels, custom events, or deep segmentation, go with Plausible or Fathom. If you want full enterprise analytics self-hosted, Matomo. If you want a free self-hosted setup and don't mind the maintenance, Umami.

If you want something fast and simple that tells you the basics without a $9+/month bill per site, give tinystat a try. Free plan, one script tag, thirty seconds to set up.