Google Analytics alternatives: what privacy actually costs
GA4 is free and most alternatives aren't — so the pitch is privacy, simplicity, and owning your data. The cheapest credible options start at $6/month or self-hosted free.
Updated 2026-08-25 · prices verified against official pages
The honest starting point
Google Analytics costs nothing and does everything — our own listing says so. Paying for an alternative buys three things: no cookie banners (privacy-first tools are typically consent-exempt), radically simpler dashboards, and not feeding your traffic data to an ad company. Whether that's worth $9–19/month is a values question; the prices at least are facts.
The privacy-first cluster
Pirsch starts at $6/month for 10,000 pageviews — currently the cheapest paid entry. Plausible and DataFast start at $9, Seline at $14, Fathom and Simple Analytics around $15–20. Umami undercuts everyone by being open source: self-host free, or its cloud Hobby tier is free to 100K events with Pro at $20.
Matomo is the both-worlds option: the self-hosted Community edition is genuinely free and battle-tested; its cloud starts around €22/month, and the pricey on-premise tiers you may see quoted are support bundles, not the software.
Don't confuse the subtypes
PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude and Heap are product analytics — event pipelines, funnels, session replays — a different job than web analytics, priced usage-based with generous free tiers (Amplitude gives 2M events/month free). They appear on our pages with subtype labels so a marketing site owner doesn't accidentally 'save money' into a tool built for product teams.
Every claim above links back to computed comparisons with sourced, dated pricing.
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