Which web analytics tools are actually free, and which need a server

Umami is the closest thing to a drop-in for how most people use Google Analytics: one page of visitors, referrers, pages, countries, and devices, plus custom events and funnels. It sets no cookies, so the consent banner goes away, and both routes are genuinely free. The Cloud Hobby plan is free permanently, and the MIT license means you can move the same app to your own Postgres server whenever you want.

PostHog is the upgrade, not the simplification: event analytics, session replay, feature flags, surveys, and error tracking under one login. The free tier is the most generous in the category, with 1 million events, 5,000 web session replays, and 1 million feature flag requests every month, no card required. If GA4 felt shallow rather than complicated, this is where you go.

Microsoft Clarity does one job well: it shows you what people actually did on your pages. Session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, and automated flags for rage clicks and dead clicks, all free with no traffic limit and no paid tier to upgrade to. It is the direct free answer to Hotjar.

Plausible is the best-looking privacy dashboard in the category: a single page, a sub-1 KB script, no cookies, and numbers that mean what they say. Here is the part people miss. Plausible Cloud has no free plan, only a 30-day trial and then $9 per month billed annually. It is free only if you self-host the AGPL Community Edition yourself.

Matomo is the nearest thing to Google Analytics you can own outright: goals, funnels, ecommerce revenue, session recordings, heatmaps, and the visitor-level logs GA4 removed. The self-hosted On-Premise edition is GPL-3.0 with unlimited hits and unlimited users, and it installs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting. Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at 29 euros per month.

GoatCounter is the smallest useful analytics tool there is: pageviews over time, top pages, referrers, countries, and screen sizes, and nothing else on purpose. The hosted service is free for what the author calls reasonable public usage, funded by donations, and the self-hosted version is a single Go binary that runs on SQLite. It is a one-person project, and honest about doing less than everyone else.

Counter.dev goes further on privacy than anything else here. It sets no cookies, logs no IP addresses, and does no fingerprinting, resolving visitor country at the Cloudflare edge so the address never reaches storage. The model is pay-what-you-want, including nothing, with no published quotas, and the code is AGPL-3.0 with a separate self-hosting repository.

Google Analytics 4 is free and still the most capable analytics platform most people can get, with Google Ads linking, attribution, audiences, and free BigQuery export. It is on this list for its complexity, not its price. People leave GA4 because the event-based interface turned two-click questions into exploration builds, retention caps at 14 months, and explorations sample above 10 million events per query.

Hotjar popularised session recordings and heatmaps for marketing teams, and the product is still good. What changed is who sells it: Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects there, so the old Basic and Plus plans are gone. A free tier remains, capped at 10,000 session replays a month on one project, with a Growth ladder that climbs from $49 to $739.

Product analytics grown into a platform, with 2 million events a month free and an account-deletion policy worth reading.

Event-based product analytics with unlimited seats on every tier, and a free plan capped at 1 million events a month.