A lot of "free" analytics is free to download. Plausible Community Edition, self-hosted Matomo, PostHog's self-hosted version and Umami all cost nothing in licence fees, and then running the server and its database is your job.
This list covers the other kind. The vendor hosts it, and the free plan has no trial clock on it. We make Spreelytics, so read our entry with that in mind. Every free plan here was checked in November 2026 against the vendor's own pages, and limits move, so check again before you commit.
The short answer
For funnels, retention and revenue by channel with nothing to host, Spreelytics is free up to 1 million events a month. Google Analytics 4 has no event cap and is hard to beat if you buy Google Ads. For plain page counts, use Cloudflare Web Analytics or GoatCounter. Microsoft Clarity is the free pick for recordings and heatmaps.
At a glance
| Tool | Free allowance | History on the free plan | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spreelytics | 1M events a month, unlimited projects | 13 months | Funnels, retention and revenue by channel |
| Google Analytics 4 | No event cap | 2 months by default, up to 14 for explorations | Sites that buy Google Ads |
| Umami Cloud | 100k events a month, 1 website | 6 months | A small site with simple needs |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Free, 10 sites unless proxied through Cloudflare | 6 months | Page views and page speed |
| GoatCounter | Free for reasonable use | Not stated in its terms | Personal sites and small businesses |
| Microsoft Clarity | No traffic limit | 30 days of recordings, 9 months of other data | Recordings and heatmaps |
| PostHog Cloud | 1M events a month, 1 project | 1 year | Product analytics with flags and replay |
| Simple Analytics | Unlimited pageviews under fair use, 5 sites, 1 user | 30 days | Cookieless counts for a hobby site |
Plausible is missing on purpose, because its cloud is a 30-day trial and then paid, and the only free version is the one you host yourself. We compare its paid plans in our pricing comparison.
1. Spreelytics
One script tag sends web analytics and product analytics into the same event stream. Sources, pages, UTM tags and referrers sit next to goals, funnels, retention cohorts, journeys, segments and a timeline for each person. Nothing is sampled. Payments from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy are credited to the channel that brought the buyer in, last-touch or linear over a window from 1 to 90 days, and MRR, ARR and refunds get a Revenue page of their own.
There is nothing to host. No database to look after either. New projects are cookieless and store nothing in the browser, with one first-party cookie you can switch on per project. An MCP server comes with every plan. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or VS Code can read your numbers through it and build reports.
Where others win: we have no heatmaps, feature flags or experiments, the code is closed, and you can't self-host it. Session replay needs Growth and works on websites only.
Pricing: free up to 1 million events a month, forever, with unlimited projects, team members and dashboards and every feature except session replay and the in-app AI assistant. Free keeps 13 months. Growth adds both, from $59 a month for 1 million events, and keeps 5 years. See pricing.
2. Google Analytics 4
GA4 charges nothing at any volume. Its links into Google Ads and Search Console are first-party, and every agency already knows it.
Funnels, paths and cohorts are explorations you build by hand, and they switch to a sample once a query covers more than 10 million events. Event-level data is kept for 2 months unless someone raises it to 14. Check that setting before you need old data.
Pricing: free. GA4 360 is sold through Google and its resellers on an annual contract, with no public price. See Is Google Analytics free? and Spreelytics vs GA4.
Choose it if you spend money on Google Ads and want that loop closed.
3. Umami Cloud
Umami is open source under MIT, and since version 3 it has journeys, retention, segments, revenue with first or last-click attribution, and visitor profiles. Its cloud has a free Hobby plan. It sets no cookies. The same code self-hosts easily if you outgrow the plan or want the data on your own box.
The Hobby plan is small, though. One website, 100,000 events a month, six months of data, and no API or MCP access.
Pricing: Hobby is free. Pro is $20 a month for a million events, the cheapest paid plan in our pricing comparison. See Spreelytics vs Umami.
Choose it if you run one modest site and like having a self-host exit.
4. Cloudflare Web Analytics
Cloudflare counts page views without cookies or local storage, and it reports Core Web Vitals from real visitors. If your site already runs through Cloudflare, one switch in the dashboard adds the script, and Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control can allow or block each AI crawler.
Full detail lasts 7 days. After that, data is sampled down to about a tenth. It drops query strings, so UTM tags never arrive, and there are no custom events to build funnels or goals from.
Pricing: free on every Cloudflare plan. Sites that aren't proxied through Cloudflare are capped at 10, and proxied ones have no limit. See Spreelytics vs Cloudflare.
Choose it if page views and page speed are the whole question.
5. GoatCounter
GoatCounter is a small open-source counter with a free hosted service in Finland and Germany. It can count with a tracking pixel, so it works with JavaScript off, and by default it stores totals with no row per page view. IP addresses never reach the disk.
Its terms welcome a personal site or a small-to-medium business and rule out "millions of pageviews/day", so a very busy site needs something else. It forgets a visitor after eight hours, by design, which leaves funnels, retention and journeys out.
Pricing: free for reasonable public use, with donations welcome. See Spreelytics vs GoatCounter.
Choose it if you want plain visit counts for a blog and nothing else.
6. Microsoft Clarity
Clarity records sessions and draws heatmaps for free, with no traffic limit. We can't match that. Copilot sums up recordings in plain language, and its AI Visibility pages show how often AI answers cite your pages.
Recording stops at 100,000 sessions a day per project. Recordings are kept for 30 days and other data for 9 months. Funnels count sessions rather than people. There's no retention report or revenue by channel, and it sets first- and third-party cookies.
Pricing: free. See Spreelytics vs Clarity.
Choose it if you want to watch how people use a page. Plenty of teams run it beside another tool.
7. PostHog Cloud
PostHog started as product analytics and grew into session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys and a data warehouse. Each product has its own meter and its own free allowance, and for an engineering team that ships behind flags, that's one SDK for all of it.
The free plan takes 1 million events a month in one project and keeps a year. Past the million, events are dropped. A spike on Free loses that data for good.
Pricing: free up to the million, then pay-as-you-go per event, with a spending limit for each product. See PostHog pricing explained and Spreelytics vs PostHog.
Choose it if your team will use replay and flags every week.
8. Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is a cookieless service hosted in the Netherlands that never stores an IP address, not even a hashed one. Its free plan has no pageview cap under a fair-use policy.
That plan keeps 30 days. Anything older is deleted. It covers 5 websites and 1 user and needs their badge on your site. The product never links one visit to the next, so retention and journeys are out by design.
Pricing: free for hobby sites, paid plans after that. See Spreelytics vs Simple Analytics.
Choose it if the last 30 days are all you ever read and you want no IP address stored anywhere.
What self-hosting really costs
Self-hosted tools cost nothing to license. Each one needs a server that's up every hour of the year, because a tracking request that hits a dead box is a visit you never get back. The database grows with every page view. New versions are yours to apply, database migrations included, and so are the security patches.
Backups too. If the disk dies and nobody copied the data, your history goes with it.
GoatCounter is one program and a SQLite file, and Umami is one container plus a database. Matomo is a server you keep running, with funnels, cohorts and session recording sold as paid plugins even when you host it. At small scale the hosting bill is small, and most of the cost is the time of whoever looks after the server.
How to choose
- You want funnels, retention and revenue by channel for free: Spreelytics.
- You buy Google Ads: GA4, maybe beside a second tool.
- You want page counts and nothing else: Cloudflare Web Analytics or GoatCounter.
- You want to watch sessions and see heatmaps: Microsoft Clarity.
- Your engineers want flags and experiments: PostHog Cloud.
- You run one small site and might self-host later: Umami Cloud.
- The data must stay on your own servers: self-hosted Matomo, Umami or PostHog. We don't offer that.