Matomo is free to own and never free to rent
Nothing on Matomo Cloud costs nothing. The entry tier is 29 euros a month, and what it buys is 50,000 hits rather than 50,000 pageviews (as of July 2026). A hit is any tracked action, so an event, a download, an outbound click or a site search all draw on the same meter as a page view.
The free Matomo is the On-Premise edition: GPL-3.0, unlimited hits, unlimited users, installed on your own PHP and MySQL server. It is the deepest free analytics product in this category and the one that most resembles owning Google Analytics outright. What it asks in return is that you become its administrator.
Facts checked July 2026
Matomo free plan at a glance
- Free plan score
- 67/100Usable
- Is it really free?
- Yes, within limits
- Paid plans from
- €29/month
67 out of 100, split between a free build and a paid cloud
67 lands in our Usable band, and like Plausible the number is averaging two very different offers. Generosity scores 54 because Matomo Cloud has no free tier at all, which drags on a total that the self-hosted build alone would push much higher.
Feature depth at 82 is the story worth reading. Measured on the own-your-own-GA4 job, the free On-Premise build is the deepest thing in this category: goals, funnels, ecommerce revenue, campaign tracking, tag manager, A/B testing, and the visitor-level logs GA4 removed years ago. Freedom scores 86 on GPL-3.0 running on hardware you control, with the caveat that some behaviour features, heatmaps and session recording among them, are sold to self-hosters as separate premium plugins. The pillar reasoning below carries the specifics.
67/100
Usable
Everything GA4 does and more, free on your own server, with nothing free in the cloud.
- Free plan generosity35% of the score
54/100
Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at 29 euros a month, and that entry tier buys 50,000 hits, not pageviews. A hit is any tracked action, so a pageview, an event, a download, an outbound click or a site search all draw on the same meter (as of July 2026). Free means the GPL-3.0 On-Premise edition: unlimited hits, unlimited users, on your own PHP and MySQL server.
- Feature depth for the category25% of the score
82/100
Measured on the own-your-own-GA4 job, the free self-hosted build is the deepest thing in this category: goals, funnels, ecommerce revenue, campaign tracking, tag manager, A/B testing and the visitor-level logs GA4 removed. The gap to watch is that some behaviour features, heatmaps and session recording among them, are sold as separate premium plugins to self-hosters.
- Freedom and honesty20% of the score
86/100
GPL-3.0 on hardware you control, with no cap, no branding and no vendor holding your history. It installs on ordinary shared hosting, which makes it the most approachable self-host here. The work is real though: report archiving has to move to a cron job once traffic grows, or your own dashboards slow to a crawl, and paid support starts at 275 euros a month if you want it.
- What free users report20% of the score
52/100
Capterra 4.7 (checked 24 July 2026) is our only score, from one provider, rating a product split between paying Cloud customers and self-hosters we cannot separate. We hold nothing about the On-Premise edition specifically, so this stays at the middle.
Scored July 2026. How we calculate the free plan score.
Hits, not pageviews, and the limits that only apply if you pay
The free self-hosted edition has no usage limits at all. What it has is workload (as of July 2026):
- A PHP and MySQL server that is now yours. Matomo installs on ordinary shared hosting, which makes it the most approachable self-host in this category, and that is genuinely true on day one.
- Report archiving must move to a cron job once traffic is real, or your own dashboards slow to a crawl. This is the step people skip and then blame the software for.
- The database grows quickly, so backups and disk are a standing concern rather than a one-off.
- Some premium plugins, including heatmaps and session recording, are sold separately to self-hosters. The core analytics does not need them.
- Paid support bundles start at 275 euros a month if you want somebody to call, which most self-hosters do not buy.
If you are pricing Cloud instead, the metering is the limit to understand. 50,000 hits is a good deal less traffic than 50,000 pageviews, because a single visit on a site with rich event tracking can easily be five hits or more. Do not compare Matomo's tier against another tool's pageview allowance without converting first.
One number we do not hold: Matomo does not publish its Cloud trial length anywhere we could verify, so we are not quoting one.
29 euros for 50,000 hits, or nothing at all for every one of them
Cloud Starter is 29 euros a month for 50,000 hits with data stored in Frankfurt, and it is the highest entry price of the open-source options in this category. Cloud Business scales by traffic tier up to 10 million hits a month or more with premium features included, and Enterprise is custom priced with dedicated support and SLAs. Annual billing gives roughly two months free. We hold no verified figures for the tiers above Starter, so we are not quoting them.
What Cloud actually sells is the same thing Plausible's Cloud sells: somebody else running the server. The software is identical, so the upgrade is never about features, it is about who applies the updates and who fixes archiving at 2am. Priced against a sysadmin's time, 29 euros is cheap. Priced against the free On-Premise build you could run on hosting you already pay for, it is a choice about attention rather than money.
The trap in the ladder is the hit meter, and it is the one thing to model before committing to Cloud. Add event tracking to a busy site and your hit count can multiply without your traffic changing at all, which moves you up a tier for reasons that have nothing to do with visitors.
On-Premise (self-hosted)
Free
The full GPL-3.0 application on your own PHP and MySQL server, unlimited users and unlimited hits, community forum support
Cloud Starter
€29/mo
Entry hosted plan with data stored in Frankfurt, Germany
50,000 hits per month
Cloud Business
Free
Scales by traffic tier up to 10 million or more hits per month, with premium features included
Enterprise
Free
Custom pricing with dedicated support and SLAs
As of July 2026. Check current pricing on the Matomo pricing page.
Is Matomo really free? Yes on-premise, never in the cloud
A real free plan with a ceiling you will meet. Fine until you grow into it.
Yes, within limits, and the limits are labour rather than quota. On-Premise is properly free: GPL-3.0, unlimited hits, unlimited users, no feature gates on the core product, forever. That is a stronger free offer than anything else in this category gives away, and it is the reason Matomo belongs on a free tools site despite having no free hosted plan at all.
Who genuinely runs it for nothing: organisations that need GA4-level depth without sending data to Google, ecommerce sites that want revenue reporting they own, public sector and healthcare teams with hard data residency rules, anyone who wants visitor-level logs back. If your hosting already runs PHP applications, the marginal cost is close to zero.
Who should not: anyone unwilling to configure a cron job, and any small site that will never touch the features justifying Matomo's weight. For them Umami's free plan does the job with a tenth of the maintenance, and Plausible's free plan makes a similar trade with a nicer dashboard.
Free Matomo alternatives covers the lighter options, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.
Frequently asked questions about Matomo
Is Matomo free?
The self-hosted On-Premise edition is, under GPL-3.0, with unlimited users and unlimited hits. Matomo Cloud is a paid product starting at 29 euros a month for 50,000 hits with no permanent free tier (as of July 2026). Anyone saying Matomo is simply free means the version you install yourself.
What is a hit, and why does it matter for pricing?
Matomo meters hits rather than pageviews, and a hit is any tracked action: a pageview, an event, a download, an outbound click, a site search or an ecommerce action. On a site with rich event tracking one visit can be five hits or more, so Cloud's 50,000-hit tier is much less traffic than 50,000 pageviews would be.
How much work is self-hosting Matomo?
It installs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting, which makes it the most approachable self-host in this category. The work comes later: at real traffic the database grows fast and report archiving has to be set up as a cron job, or your dashboards get slow. Some behaviour plugins are also sold separately to self-hosters.
Where to go next
If this free plan does not stretch far enough, these are the tools we would look at instead.