Free alternatives to Google Analytics (GA4)
Almost nobody leaves Google Analytics over money, because GA4 is free. They leave because the GA4 interface turned a two-click question into an exploration, because explorations start sampling above 10 million events per query, because data retention maxes out at 14 months, and because sending visitor data to Google now comes with a consent banner and a GDPR conversation. The good news is that the reports most people actually open, traffic, sources, top pages, and conversions, are exactly what the alternatives below do best.
Facts checked as of July 2026Read our Google Analytics (GA4) review
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Umami
Best Free Alternative ToGoogle Analytics (GA4)The only option here with both a free hosted plan and an MIT license, so you can leave GA4 today and never be locked in again
Umami is the closest thing to a drop-in replacement for how most people actually use GA4. One dashboard shows visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, referrers, pages, countries, and devices, with custom events and funnels when you need them. It sets no cookies, so the consent banner goes away, and because the application is MIT licensed you can move from the free Cloud plan to your own Postgres server whenever you want, with no export project involved.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT)
United States- Best for:
- Anyone whose GA4 usage is really just the weekly traffic check
- The catch:
- Umami does not publish its Cloud event allowance anywhere machine-readable, so confirm the current Hobby limits before you point a busy site at it.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: No cookies and no consent banner required
- Advantage: The whole dashboard is one page instead of GA4's exploration builder
- Advantage: MIT licensed, so self-hosting is a permanent free exit
- Advantage: No sampling, unlike GA4 explorations above 10M events per query
- Tradeoff: No Google Ads or Search Console integration at all
- Tradeoff: No app analytics, so mobile products still need something else
The best-looking privacy dashboard in the category, free if you self-host the AGPL Community Edition
Plausible is what people picture when they imagine the opposite of GA4: a single page, a sub-1 KB script, no cookies, and numbers that mean what they say. Funnels, goals, and campaign tracking cover most of what you left GA4 for. Be clear on the money though, because this is where readers get caught. Plausible Cloud has no free plan, just a 30-day trial and then $9 per month billed annually at 10,000 pageviews. Free means running the Community Edition yourself.
- From $9/month (as of July 2026)
- Estonia
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Estonia- Best for:
- Teams who will either self-host or happily pay $9 to $19 a month for a calmer dashboard
- The catch:
- Free only applies to the self-hosted edition, and that one needs both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: Cookieless, so no consent banner and a simpler GDPR position
- Advantage: Tracking script under 1 KB against GA4's much heavier tag
- Advantage: No sampling at any volume
- Tradeoff: GA4 is free hosted; Plausible Cloud starts at $9/month after a 30-day trial
- Tradeoff: No session replay, heatmaps, or app analytics
- Tradeoff: Funnels and ecommerce revenue need the $19 Business tier
The only free option that matches GA4 feature for feature, and gives you back visitor-level logs
If you are leaving GA4 but cannot give up the depth, Matomo is the answer and has been since it was called Piwik in 2007. Goals, funnels, ecommerce revenue, campaign tracking, custom dimensions, a tag manager, A/B testing, session recordings, and heatmaps, plus individual visitor logs that GA4 took away. Self-hosted On-Premise is GPL-3.0 with unlimited hits and unlimited users, so it is genuinely free, and it installs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting.
- From €29/month (as of July 2026)
- New Zealand
- Open source (GPL-3.0)
New Zealand- Best for:
- Ecommerce and enterprise teams that need GA4 depth without Google
- The catch:
- Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at €29 per month for 50,000 hits, and hits count events and downloads too, not just pageviews.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: Visitor-level logs, which GA4 removed
- Advantage: Session recordings and heatmaps built in, which GA4 has never had
- Advantage: Self-hosted means unlimited retention instead of GA4's 14-month cap
- Advantage: No sampling and full data ownership
- Tradeoff: The interface is heavier and more menu-driven than GA4's
- Tradeoff: Free only if you administer a PHP and MySQL server yourself
- Tradeoff: Cloud starts at €29/month against GA4's zero
1 million events, 5,000 session replays, and 1 million feature flag requests free every month
PostHog is the upgrade rather than the simplification. Where GA4 tells you what happened on your pages, PostHog tells you where users dropped out of your onboarding, lets you watch the recording, and lets you ship a fix behind a feature flag. The free tier is the most generous in analytics: 1 million events, 5,000 web session replays, 1 million flag requests, 1,500 survey responses, and 100,000 error tracking exceptions per month, with no card required.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT (with a proprietary ee/ directory))
- Best for:
- SaaS and product teams who found GA4 shallow rather than complicated
- The catch:
- It is heavier than GA4, not lighter, and one noisy autocapture setting will burn through a million events faster than you expect.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: Session replay, feature flags, and surveys in the same tool
- Advantage: No sampling, and 1M events per month free
- Advantage: SQL access to your own event data
- Tradeoff: Far steeper learning curve than GA4, not gentler
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, so it does not remove your consent banner
- Tradeoff: No Google Ads integration
Free session replay and heatmaps with no traffic limit, answering the question GA4 never could
Clarity is not a GA4 replacement and we would not pretend otherwise; it has no proper acquisition reports or attribution. What it does is fill GA4's biggest gap. When your funnel report shows a 60 percent drop-off on the checkout page, GA4 tells you it happened and Clarity shows you the rage clicks that caused it. It is free forever with no traffic limits and no paid tier, which is genuinely rare.
- Completely free (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Running alongside whatever you replace GA4 with, not instead of it
- The catch:
- Recordings are only kept 30 days, it uses cookies, and Microsoft receives your visitors' behavioral data.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: Session recordings and heatmaps, which GA4 does not offer
- Advantage: No traffic limits and no sampling at all
- Worth knowing: Integrates with GA4 rather than replacing it
- Tradeoff: No acquisition, attribution, or revenue reporting
- Tradeoff: Thirty-day recording retention against GA4's 14 months
- Tradeoff: Your data goes to Microsoft instead of Google, which may not be the change you wanted
The smallest possible answer to "how many people visited", free hosted and free to self-host
GoatCounter is for people who opened GA4, realized they only ever wanted one number, and closed it again. Pageviews over time, top pages, referrers, campaigns, countries, browsers, screen sizes. Nothing else, on purpose. The hosted service is free for what the author calls reasonable public usage, funded by GitHub Sponsors, and the EUPL-licensed self-hosted version is a single Go binary that runs on SQLite.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Netherlands
- Open source (EUPL-1.2 (modified))
Netherlands- Best for:
- Blogs, docs sites, and personal projects where GA4 was always overkill
- The catch:
- The free hosted terms are defined as "reasonable public usage" with no published number, and the pricing help page is currently a dead link.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: Cookieless, with no consent banner needed
- Advantage: Takes about ten minutes to self-host from a single binary
- Advantage: Dramatically simpler than GA4, which is the entire point
- Tradeoff: No goals, funnels, events, or conversion tracking
- Tradeoff: Free hosted limits are not published anywhere we could verify
- Tradeoff: A solo project with no company behind it
Pay what you want, including nothing, with no IP logging and no published quotas
Counter.dev goes further on privacy than anything else here. It does not store IP addresses at all, resolving visitor country from the header Cloudflare has already set at its edge, so the address never reaches storage. The model is pay-what-you-want with no quotas or feature gates published, and the code is AGPL-3.0 with a separate self-hosting repository. For a personal site leaving GA4 on principle, it is the purest option on the list.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Germany
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Germany- Best for:
- Personal sites where the objection to GA4 is philosophical rather than practical
- The catch:
- It is a hobby-scale project by the author's own published figures (€350 in donations across 26 payments in 2022), so do not build a business on it.
Compared to Google Analytics (GA4)
- Advantage: No cookies, no IP logging, and no fingerprinting
- Advantage: Costs nothing unless you decide to pay something
- Advantage: AGPL-3.0 with a documented self-hosting recipe
- Tradeoff: No events, goals, funnels, or conversion tracking
- Tradeoff: Thin funding and no support organization
- Tradeoff: No published data retention policy
How to choose
Start by asking what you use GA4 for. If it is Google Ads attribution or app analytics, stay, because nothing here replaces that. If it is the weekly traffic check, Umami gives you a free hosted plan and an MIT license so you are never stuck. If you need GA4-level depth without Google, Matomo self-hosted is the only real match. And if your objection is privacy specifically, any of Plausible, Umami, GoatCounter, or Counter.dev will let you delete the cookie banner the same afternoon.