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The 11 Best Web Analytics Tools in 2026
Which analytics software to put on your site, what each one costs, and which ones need a cookie banner.
In short
- Most startups need four numbers: visitors, where they came from, what they did, and which of them paid. Pick the tool that shows those without a week of setup.
- Cookieless tools (clicks.page, Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch, Umami) don't set cookies on your visitors' devices. Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity do.
- If you sell something, revenue attribution matters more than anything else on this list. It tells you which channel actually pays.
- Free isn't free of cost. Google Analytics is free and sets cookies; Cloudflare is free and has no custom events or UTM reports.
- Small sites can get paid, cookieless analytics for $6 to $9 a month.
Disclosure. clicks.page is ours, and it's the analytics running on this site. Read the number one pick with that in mind. Every other price and limit here was read off the vendor's own site on 1 October 2026; prices change, so check before you buy.
You add a script to your site, open a dashboard a week later, and find forty reports you'll never read. Meanwhile the one question you had, which of your launch posts brought in paying customers, has no answer anywhere.
That's the problem with most web analytics software. It counts everything and explains very little. This list ranks the tools we'd put on a startup's site today, for a founder who wants answers more than reports.
What to look for in web analytics software
- Sources you can act on. Referrers and UTM campaigns, so you know whether the newsletter or the Reddit post did the work.
- Revenue, not just visits. If you charge money, you want sales credited back to the channel they came from.
- No cookie banner, if you can avoid one. A cookieless tool sets nothing on your visitors' devices, so analytics alone doesn't put a consent pop-up in front of them.
- A price that fits your traffic. Most paid tools charge by monthly pageviews or events. Check what counts toward the limit.
- Data you can get out. An API, exports, and for some teams, the option to self-host.
The eleven
clicks.page
Cookieless analytics that shows which clicks make you money.
- Best for
- Founders who sell something and want to know which channel pays
- Free option
- 14-day trial, no card
- Paid from
- $9/mo for 10k pageviews
- Cookies
- None, and no IPs stored
- Revenue
- Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Dodo, Creem
Most analytics tools stop at the visit. clicks.page follows it to the sale. Connect Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Dodo Payments or Creem, and each payment is credited to the page, source and campaign that brought the buyer in. Renewals go back to the original source, so a channel keeps getting credit for the customers it found.
It's built for founders who work with AI agents. Paste one prompt into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex and the agent signs you in, adds the script for your framework and checks the first pageview arrives. After that, an MCP server lets you ask your agent "which source made the most money this week?" and get the answer from your real numbers.
The rest is what you'd want from a modern tool: realtime visitors on a live map, funnels, goals, custom events, UTM campaigns, a REST API and shareable stat cards. Bots, headless browsers, datacenter traffic and referrer spam are filtered out. Every plan has every feature, and only pageviews count toward the limit; custom events and payments don't.
Pricing is $9 a month for 10k pageviews, $19 for 100k and $49 for 1M, across up to 100 websites. Yearly billing gives two months free. If you go over, it keeps collecting and never charges overage.
Why it’s here:Revenue attribution and agent setup, with no cookies and no banner.
Watch out:There's no free plan for new accounts after the trial, and no self-hosted version.
Plausible
Simple, open-source, EU-hosted analytics.
- Best for
- Teams that want a lightweight Google Analytics alternative hosted in the EU
- Free option
- 30-day trial, no card; free self-hosted edition
- Paid from
- $9/mo for 10k pageviews
- Cookies
- None
- Hosting
- EU, or self-host
Plausible is the tool most people mean when they say "privacy-friendly analytics". One clean dashboard, no cookies, a 2.5KB script, and data made and hosted in the EU.
It's open source. The Community Edition is free to self-host under AGPLv3 if you'd rather run it yourself. The cloud version adds scroll-depth tracking, AI-referrer reports and a Search Console integration.
The cheapest plan, Starter, covers one site. Funnels, custom properties and the Stats API need the Business tier. The checkout may show prices in your local currency.
Why it’s here:Open source, EU-hosted, and a tiny script.
Watch out:Funnels and the API sit on the pricier Business tier.
Fathom Analytics
Privacy-first analytics with every feature on every plan.
- Best for
- Agencies and teams running many sites
- Free option
- 7-day trial, card required
- Paid from
- $15/mo for 100k pageviews
- Cookies
- None
- Sites
- 50 included
Fathom doesn't use cookies and says no consent banner is required. Every plan has the whole product: events, revenue, the API and email reports.
Its EU handling is careful. Traffic from EU visitors is processed on EU servers and IP addresses are stripped there, before the anonymised data is stored on Fathom's US servers.
The entry plan starts at 100k pageviews, so it's generous for growing sites and pricier than the 10k plans elsewhere if you're tiny.
Why it’s here:50 sites on the base plan, and no feature gates.
Watch out:No free plan, the trial needs a card, and you can't self-host it.
Google Analytics 4
The free default, for better and worse.
- Best for
- Sites that run Google Ads, or need web and app data in one place
- Free option
- Free
- Paid from
- Analytics 360, sales only
- Cookies
- Yes: _ga, kept up to 2 years
- History
- Explorations: up to 14 months
GA4 is free, it's everywhere, and it ties into Google Ads in a way nothing else here does. If you buy search ads, that alone can decide it.
It also asks the most of you. The interface is built for analysts, explorations keep at most 14 months of data on the free tier, and reports are sampled above 10M events per query. You get 30 key events and a free BigQuery export capped at 1M events a day.
It sets first-party cookies on your visitors' devices. Plan for a consent banner wherever your visitors' laws require one.
Why it’s here:Free, deep, and the best Google Ads integration you can get.
Watch out:Sets cookies, takes real time to learn, and limits history on the free tier.
PostHog
Product analytics, session replay and feature flags in one suite.
- Best for
- Product teams who want analytics, replays and experiments together
- Free option
- 1M events a month, every month
- Paid from
- Pay as you go, from $0.00005/event
- Cookies
- Optional cookieless mode
- Hosting
- US or EU cloud
PostHog is less a web analytics tool than a whole product toolkit: product and web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, error tracking and surveys. The free tier is large: 1M analytics events and 5K session recordings a month, with no card.
Past the free tier you pay per event, with no fixed fee, and you can set billing limits per product so a traffic spike doesn't become a surprise bill.
It has a cookieless mode that avoids a banner just for analytics, but you have to turn it on. A self-hosted version exists, and PostHog says it's unsupported.
Why it’s here:The biggest free tier here, and far more than page analytics.
Watch out:A lot of tool if all you want is visitors and sources.
Umami
Open-source analytics with a real free cloud plan.
- Best for
- Developers who want open source and a free hosted option
- Free option
- Hobby: 100K events, 1 site
- Paid from
- $20/mo for 1M events
- Cookies
- None
- Hosting
- US/EU cloud, or self-host
Umami is open source, sets no cookies, and can be self-hosted on PostgreSQL. Its cloud Hobby plan is free for one site and 100K events a month, with six months of history.
For a free plan it does a lot: funnels, retention, journeys, attribution and revenue reports. Pro adds 20 sites, two years of history and API and MCP access.
Why it’s here:Funnels and revenue reports on a free plan.
Watch out:The free plan is one site with no API or email reports.
Simple Analytics
Dutch, cookieless, with a free hobby plan.
- Best for
- Hobby sites, and teams that want data kept in the Netherlands
- Free option
- Free for hobby sites (5 sites, badge)
- Paid from
- $20/mo for 100k pageviews
- Cookies
- None
- Hosting
- The Netherlands
Simple Analytics keeps your data in the Netherlands, sets no cookies and collects no personal data. Its light script is 1.9KB gzipped.
The free plan covers five websites with a badge on your site, but only keeps one month of history.
Paid plans start at 100k pageviews and include one user; each extra user is another $20 a month, so the price climbs with the size of your team.
Why it’s here:A forever-free plan that isn't just a trial.
Watch out:One month of history on the free plan, and per-user pricing after that.
Pirsch
German-hosted, cookieless and cheap.
- Best for
- The lowest price for paid, cookieless analytics
- Free option
- 30-day trial, no card
- Paid from
- $6/mo for 10k pageviews
- Cookies
- None
- Hosting
- Germany
At $6 a month for 10k pageviews, Pirsch is the cheapest paid plan on this list. That price includes 50 websites, unlimited team members and unlimited data retention.
It works without cookies, hosts data in Germany, ships a script of around 4KB and adds a URL shortener. Funnels and A/B testing are on the Plus plan.
Hit your pageview limit, though, and the dashboard stops at that day until you upgrade or the month resets.
Why it’s here:Lowest entry price here, with unlimited retention.
Watch out:Go over the limit and your dashboard stops updating.
Matomo
The open-source Google Analytics replacement.
- Best for
- Organisations that need full data ownership
- Free option
- Free self-hosted; 21-day cloud trial
- Paid from
- Cloud: $26/mo (€22) for 50k hits
- Cookies
- Configurable, with a cookieless option
- Hosting
- Frankfurt cloud, or self-host
Matomo matches Google Analytics feature for feature and lets you own all of it. The self-hosted edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits, and you can move between cloud and self-hosted later.
It counts hits, not pageviews: every tracked request, including events and downloads, uses your allowance.
On your own server, the premium features (funnels, heatmaps, custom reports) come as paid plugin bundles, and those cost more than most tools here.
Why it’s here:GA-level depth with complete control over your data.
Watch out:Premium self-hosted features are expensive, and it's heavier to run.
Cloudflare Web Analytics
Free, private, and very basic.
- Best for
- Sites already on Cloudflare that want free, simple numbers
- Free option
- Free
- Paid from
- No paid tier
- Cookies
- None, no fingerprinting
- History
- 6 months
Cloudflare's analytics is free and uses no cookies, localStorage or fingerprinting. If your site is proxied through Cloudflare there's no limit on sites, and it adds Core Web Vitals so you can see how fast your pages load for real visitors.
It's thin, though. There are no custom events or UTM reports yet, only six months of history, and data older than a week is sampled.
Why it’s here:Free, cookie-free, with real-user performance data.
Watch out:No custom events or UTM campaigns, so you can't measure conversions.
Microsoft Clarity
Free heatmaps and session recordings.
- Best for
- Seeing how people use a page, next to your main analytics
- Free option
- Free, no traffic limit
- Paid from
- No paid version
- Cookies
- Yes; consent required in the EEA, UK, CH
- Recordings
- Kept 30 days
Clarity isn't a replacement for traffic analytics. It's a free companion: heatmaps and session recordings that show where people click, scroll and give up.
It's free with no traffic limit and no sampling. Recordings are kept for 30 days. It sets cookies, and since October 2025 it enforces consent for visitors from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland.
Why it’s here:Free session recordings and heatmaps.
Watch out:Sets cookies, needs consent in Europe, and doesn't replace your main analytics.
Web analytics tools compared
| Tool | Free option | Paid from | Cookies | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| clicks.page | 14-day trial | $9/mo, 10k pageviews | None | Revenue by channel |
| Plausible | 30-day trial, self-host | $9/mo, 10k pageviews | None | EU-hosted simplicity |
| Fathom | 7-day trial | $15/mo, 100k pageviews | None | Many sites |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free | 360, sales only | Yes | Google Ads users |
| PostHog | 1M events/mo | Per event | Optional | Product teams |
| Umami | 100K events, 1 site | $20/mo, 1M events | None | Open source, free cloud |
| Simple Analytics | Hobby plan | $20/mo, 100k pageviews | None | Hobby sites |
| Pirsch | 30-day trial | $6/mo, 10k pageviews | None | Lowest paid price |
| Matomo | Self-hosted | $26/mo, 50k hits | Configurable | Data ownership |
| Cloudflare | Free | None | None | Free basics |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | None | Yes | Heatmaps, recordings |
How to choose
- You sell something online: clicks.page. Revenue by source is the number that tells you where to spend your next week.
- You want open source: Plausible or Umami, both self-hostable. Matomo if you need everything Google Analytics does.
- You run Google Ads: Google Analytics 4, ideally next to a cookieless tool for clean visitor counts.
- You're building a product with many features: PostHog, for replays, flags and experiments in one place.
- You want the cheapest paid plan: Pirsch, from $6 a month.
- You want free and simple: Cloudflare Web Analytics, accepting that you can't track conversions.
- You want to watch real sessions: add Microsoft Clarity alongside whichever tool you choose.
Questions people ask
What is the best web analytics tool for a startup?
If you take payments, clicks.page, because it credits revenue to the channel that brought each customer. If you only need visitor counts and sources, Plausible is a strong, simple choice.
What is the best Google Analytics alternative?
For simplicity and privacy, clicks.page, Plausible or Fathom. For the same depth as Google Analytics with full data ownership, Matomo.
Is there a free web analytics tool?
Yes. Google Analytics 4, Cloudflare Web Analytics and Microsoft Clarity are free. Umami, Simple Analytics and PostHog have free plans with limits. Plausible, Umami and Matomo can be self-hosted for free.
Do I need a cookie banner for analytics?
It depends on the tool and on the laws where your visitors are. Cookieless tools like clicks.page, Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch and Umami set no cookies on visitors' devices. Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity do. Check your own legal position.
Can I run two analytics tools at once?
Yes, and many teams do. A common pairing is a cookieless tool for traffic and revenue, plus Microsoft Clarity for recordings.
Will an analytics script slow my site down?
Lightweight tools are small: Plausible says 2.5KB, Simple Analytics' light script is 1.9KB gzipped, Pirsch around 4KB. Load any of them with defer so it doesn't block the page.
If you only do one thing
Put analytics on your site before your next launch, not after. Try clicks.page free for 14 days, no card, and by launch day you'll know which post brought the people who paid.