Google Analytics 4 is free and nearly everyone has it. People still leave it, and the reasons are usually the same. Funnels, paths and cohorts have to be built by hand in its Explore section. Large explorations come back sampled. And some teams would rather their analytics did not feed an advertising business.
This list covers eight tools people move to, including ours. We make Spreelytics, so read our entry with that in mind. For every tool, we say what it does better than we do.
Features were checked against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. Prices were checked on 1 October 2026 and change often, so confirm them on the vendor's site before you decide. For the lighter tools priced side by side, see web analytics pricing compared.
At a glance
| Tool | Best for | Free plan | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spreelytics | Seeing which channel earned your revenue | 100k events a month | No |
| Plausible | Simple, cookieless traffic stats | Trial only | Yes |
| Fathom | A privacy story legal signs off quickly | Trial only | No |
| Umami | An easy self-host or a small free cloud | 100k events, 1 site | Yes |
| Matomo | Keeping every row on your own servers | Free if you self-host | Yes |
| PostHog | Replay, feature flags and experiments | Large free allowance | Yes |
| Mixpanel | Deep product analytics for apps | 1M events | No |
| Amplitude | The widest free product suite | 2M events | No |
1. Spreelytics
Web analytics and product analytics on one stream of events, with revenue attached. Connect Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy and each payment is credited to the channel that brought the buyer in, by last-touch or linear attribution over a window you set. Subscriptions add up to MRR and ARR on a Revenue page of their own.
Funnels, retention, journeys, segments and person timelines are pages you open rather than reports you build. Every query reads every row, so nothing is sampled. A server middleware counts the AI crawlers that a browser script never sees, and an MCP server lets Claude Code or Cursor query and build reports.
Where others win: we have no heatmaps, no feature flags and no self-hosting, the code is closed, and session replay needs the Growth plan.
Pricing: free up to 100,000 events a month, with every feature except session replay and the in-app AI assistant. Growth starts at $29 a month for 250,000 events and goes to $879 for 50 million.
2. Plausible
A lightweight, open-source tool that never sets a cookie and keeps data in the EU. The dashboard is one page, and the script is tiny. It is the cleanest privacy story in this list.
Because it never recognises a returning visitor, it cannot show retention or a single person's history. Revenue goals and user journeys sit on the Business plan, and revenue is credited to the source of the visit that paid, with no model to choose.
Pricing: a 30-day trial, then from $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews. A million pageviews costs $69 on Starter and $139 on Business.
Choose it if you want honest traffic numbers and nothing more, with no consent question about cookies.
3. Fathom
A cookieless, privacy-first tool with a deliberately small feature set. Its EU isolation option strips the visitor's IP address inside the EU before the anonymised data is stored on US servers.
It answers "how much traffic, from where" very well. It does not try to follow people over time.
Pricing: a 7-day trial, then from $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews. A million costs $60, and every plan has every feature.
Choose it if you want something nobody on your team needs training for.
4. Umami
A small open-source tool under the MIT licence, easy to run on your own server. It has grown a lot since version 3, with journeys, retention, segments, revenue with first or last-click attribution, visitor profiles and session replay. Its cloud has a free Hobby plan for one site.
Pricing: free to self-host. The cloud's Hobby plan is free for 100,000 events on one site, and Pro is $20 a month for a million events.
Choose it if you want to self-host in an afternoon, or you need session replay with simple web analytics.
5. Matomo
The mature open-source option, with more than a decade of features. Self-hosted, every row stays on infrastructure you control, which can decide an evaluation in a regulated industry.
The depth comes as paid plugins, including funnels, cohorts, attribution and session recording, and a self-hosted install is a server you keep running.
Pricing: free to self-host, with paid plugins. Matomo Cloud has a 21-day trial, then started at €22 a month for 50,000 hits when we checked (it showed us prices in euros).
Choose it if you must hold the data yourself and have someone to run it.
6. PostHog
The broadest tool here. Product analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and surveys share one SDK and one bill, and the core is open source.
That breadth is real, and so is the amount there is to learn. Attribution is first or last touch, and bot reporting needs your server or CDN logs forwarded to it.
Pricing: a million events free each month, then a falling rate per event. Events tied to a known person cost extra. We worked through it in PostHog pricing explained.
Choose it if your team will use replay and flags every week.
7. Mixpanel
Event-based product analytics, strong on funnels, retention and flows inside an app, with replay, flags and experiments added. The free plan covers a million events but caps saved reports, and saved cohorts and attribution sit on paid plans.
Pricing: a million events free each month, then $0.28 per 1,000 at the low end, falling with volume. See Mixpanel pricing.
Choose it if your questions are mostly about what people do inside your product.
8. Amplitude
A digital analytics suite with replay, heatmaps, experiments, guides and surveys. It has the largest free event allowance here and the deepest attribution, with ten models including a data-driven one. Free plans cap saved charts, and custom cohorts are paid.
Pricing: 2 million events free each month. The Plus plan was $94 a month at 3 million events and $720 at 10 million. See Amplitude pricing.
Choose it if you want the most in one product and expect to grow into the paid plans.
When to stay on GA4
GA4 still wins in some cases. It costs nothing at any volume, and its links into Google Ads and Search Console are first-party and deep. If you buy a lot of Google traffic, that loop is worth real money. Plenty of teams keep GA4 for the ads link and run a second tool for everything else.
How to switch without losing a month
- Add the new tool next to GA4. Both can run at once.
- Let two weeks collect, so you can compare a full week against a full week.
- Expect the numbers to differ. Read why analytics tools never agree before you decide which is wrong.
- Recreate the goals you actually use, not every report you ever made.
- Remove the GA4 tag once you trust the new numbers, or keep it for Google Ads.
Each of these tools has a side-by-side page against Spreelytics under Compare.