Free alternatives to Matomo
Matomo gives you Google Analytics depth that you own, but free comes with conditions. Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at €29 per month for 50,000 hits (as of July 2026), and it meters hits, not pageviews, so an event, a download, or an outbound click all eat the same allowance. The free route is the self-hosted On-Premise edition, which means running and archiving a PHP and MySQL server yourself. If that is more tool or more maintenance than you wanted, here is where to look.
Facts checked as of July 2026Read our Matomo review
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Umami
Best Free Alternative ToMatomoA free hosted plan and a one-database self-host, against Matomo's paid cloud and PHP-MySQL server
Umami covers the reports most Matomo users actually open, visitors, referrers, pages, countries, events, and funnels, with a fraction of the weight. It has a permanently free Cloud Hobby plan, which Matomo Cloud does not, and an MIT license so self-hosting is genuinely free and unlimited. It counts events simply instead of metering hits, so you never have to translate 50,000 hits back into real traffic. For anyone who found Matomo to be more platform than they needed, this is the soft landing.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT)
United States- Best for:
- Teams who wanted private analytics, not a data platform to administer
- The catch:
- Umami does not publish its Cloud event allowance anywhere machine-readable, and it has nothing like Matomo's ecommerce revenue or visitor-level depth.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Free hosted Hobby plan, where Matomo Cloud has none
- Advantage: Cookieless, so no consent banner
- Advantage: Counts events plainly instead of Matomo's hit metering
- Advantage: Self-hosts on Node and Postgres, far lighter than a maintained PHP-MySQL Matomo
- Tradeoff: No ecommerce revenue reporting, which Matomo does well
- Tradeoff: No visitor-level logs and only thin session replay
A published, generous free hosted tier with product analytics, replay, and flags, no server to run
If you ran Matomo for its funnels, custom events, and behaviour features, PostHog does that job as a hosted product with a free tier you do not have to maintain. Every month you get 1 million events, 5,000 web session replays, and 1 million feature flag requests, no card required (as of July 2026). Where Matomo makes you own the server, archiving, and upgrades, PostHog just runs. It is the better pick when the depth mattered but the sysadmin work did not.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT (with a proprietary ee/ directory))
- Best for:
- Product teams who want Matomo-level analysis without maintaining a server
- The catch:
- Self-hosting PostHog is not meaningfully supported, it uses cookies, and heavy event volume can push you off the free tier onto a bill.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Generous free hosted tier, where Matomo Cloud starts at €29 per month
- Advantage: Session replay and feature flags built in, no separate plugins to buy
- Advantage: No server, archiving, or upgrades to manage
- Tradeoff: No true self-hosting story, which is Matomo's whole free model
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, so it does not remove the consent banner
- Tradeoff: Weaker on ecommerce revenue and classic web reporting than Matomo
The free hosted platform Matomo was built to replace, still the most capable if Google is acceptable
This one is a loop back to the start, since Matomo exists so you can leave Google. But if the reason you are shopping is that self-hosting Matomo turned into a maintenance job, GA4 is free hosted at any volume and gives you Google Ads and Search Console integration Matomo cannot match. It is the honest option for teams whose objection to Google was never that strong, only that Matomo was less hassle in theory than in practice.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Teams that tried self-hosting Matomo and want zero maintenance back
- The catch:
- You are handing visitor data to Google again, with a consent banner, GDPR paperwork, 14-month retention, and sampling above 10 million events per query.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Free hosted at any volume, no server and no hit metering
- Advantage: Google Ads and Search Console integration Matomo lacks
- Advantage: Free BigQuery export for raw data
- Tradeoff: Sends visitor data to Google, the thing Matomo avoids
- Tradeoff: Needs a consent banner and GDPR handling, unlike self-hosted Matomo
- Tradeoff: No visitor-level logs, and retention caps at 14 months
A far lighter, cookieless dashboard to run, if you will self-host like you already do with Matomo
Plausible is the tool for Matomo self-hosters who want the same ownership with a tenth of the upkeep. One page, a sub-1 KB script, no cookies, and no archiving cron to configure. Be clear on cost though: Plausible Cloud has no free plan, only a 30-day trial and then $9 per month, so free means self-hosting the AGPL Community Edition. If you already run your own Matomo, running Plausible instead is a familiar trade with much less to maintain day to day.
- From $9/month (as of July 2026)
- Estonia
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Estonia- Best for:
- Matomo self-hosters who want the same privacy with far less maintenance
- The catch:
- Plausible Cloud has no free tier, self-hosting needs both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, and there is no ecommerce revenue reporting outside the paid Business tier.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Dramatically lighter to run and read than a full Matomo install
- Advantage: Cookieless with a sub-1 KB script
- Advantage: Free and unlimited if you self-host, like Matomo On-Premise
- Tradeoff: No free cloud, so hosted Plausible costs money and hosted Matomo does too
- Tradeoff: Far fewer features: no visitor logs, no replay, no heatmaps
- Tradeoff: Ecommerce revenue is gated to the $19 Business tier
The lightest possible self-host, a single binary on SQLite, if Matomo was overkill for a small site
If you installed Matomo on a small site and never touched most of it, GoatCounter is the deliberate downgrade. Pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, and screen sizes, cookieless, and nothing else. The hosted service is free for reasonable public usage, and the self-hosted version is one Go binary on SQLite, which is about as far from Matomo's database maintenance as analytics gets. It is honest about doing much less.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Netherlands
- Open source (EUPL-1.2 (modified))
Netherlands- Best for:
- Blogs and small sites that never used the depth Matomo was carrying
- The catch:
- No funnels, events, ecommerce, or replay, and the free hosted terms are defined only as "reasonable public usage" with no published number.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Free hosted, where Matomo Cloud has no free tier
- Advantage: Self-hosts from one binary on SQLite, no database server to run
- Advantage: Cookieless and much simpler to read than Matomo
- Tradeoff: No goals, funnels, ecommerce, or visitor logs Matomo provides
- Tradeoff: A solo project rather than a funded company with support
- Tradeoff: Free hosted limits are unpublished and the pricing page is a dead link
Free forever session replay and heatmaps, without buying Matomo's paid behaviour plugins
Matomo can do session recordings and heatmaps, but on the self-hosted edition those are premium plugins you pay for. Clarity does the same two jobs free, with no traffic limit and no paid tier. It is not a Matomo replacement, since it has no acquisition or revenue reporting, but if the behaviour features were what you wanted from Matomo, Clarity delivers them at no cost. Most teams run it next to their main analytics.
- Completely free (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Teams who wanted Matomo's recordings and heatmaps without the plugin bill
- The catch:
- Recordings are kept only 30 days, it uses cookies, and Microsoft receives your visitors' behavioral data, which Matomo self-hosting is designed to avoid.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Free session replay and heatmaps, versus paid plugins on self-hosted Matomo
- Advantage: No traffic limit and no sampling
- Advantage: Nothing to install or maintain, unlike a Matomo server
- Tradeoff: No web analytics, acquisition, or revenue reporting like Matomo's
- Tradeoff: Your data goes to Microsoft, against Matomo's self-hosted ownership
- Tradeoff: Thirty-day recording retention, where self-hosted Matomo keeps its own
Free, no server of your own, and a stricter privacy stance than a default Matomo install
Counter.dev is the pay-what-you-want option for Matomo users who liked owning their data but did not like owning a server. It sets no cookies, logs no IP addresses, and does no fingerprinting, and it costs whatever you decide, including nothing. The code is AGPL-3.0 with a separate self-hosting repository if you want the ownership back later. It is a hobby-scale service, so treat it as such.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Germany
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Germany- Best for:
- Small private sites that want Matomo's ethos without Matomo's upkeep
- The catch:
- It is thinly funded by the author's own figures, has no events, goals, or ecommerce, and publishes no data retention policy.
Compared to Matomo
- Advantage: Costs nothing unless you choose to pay, unlike Matomo Cloud
- Advantage: No IP logging and no cookies out of the box
- Advantage: No server to run, though a self-host repo exists if you want one
- Tradeoff: Far narrower than Matomo: no events, funnels, ecommerce, or replay
- Tradeoff: Thinly funded, so plan for the service to change or stop
- Tradeoff: No published data retention policy, which an audit may need
How to choose
Umami is our default here: free hosted, MIT licensed, cookieless, and far lighter to run than a Matomo server. If you left for the product-analytics angle of funnels, retention, and replay, PostHog's free tier is more generous and needs no server of your own. If Google's ecosystem is fine and you only want the cookies gone from your conscience, GA4 is free hosted. Reach for Plausible only if you will self-host, because its cloud is paid just like Matomo's.