Free alternatives to Plausible Analytics
You probably found Plausible while looking for private analytics, then hit the catch at the checkout. Plausible Cloud has no free plan (as of July 2026), only a 30-day trial and then $9 per month billed annually at 10,000 pageviews. Free means self-hosting the AGPL Community Edition yourself, and that build needs both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. If you wanted the privacy without the bill or the two-database deployment, the tools below get you closer.
Facts checked as of July 2026Read our Plausible Analytics review
Jump to an alternative
Umami
Best Free Alternative ToPlausible AnalyticsThe same cookieless dashboard, but with a genuinely free hosted plan Plausible Cloud never offers
Umami is the closest like-for-like swap for Plausible: a single-page cookieless dashboard of visitors, referrers, pages, and countries, with custom events and funnels. The difference is the money. Umami Cloud has a permanently free Hobby plan and the app is MIT licensed, so you can start free and move to your own server later. Plausible only gives you a 30-day trial before it charges. Umami even adds light session replay and heatmaps that Plausible does not have at all.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT)
United States- Best for:
- Anyone who wanted Plausible's privacy but not its subscription
- The catch:
- Umami does not publish its Cloud event allowance anywhere machine-readable, so confirm the current Hobby limit before you point a busy site at it.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Free hosted Hobby plan, where Plausible Cloud has no free tier
- Advantage: Also cookieless, so the consent banner stays gone
- Advantage: Self-hosts on one Postgres database, not Plausible's Postgres plus ClickHouse
- Advantage: Includes light session replay and heatmaps, which Plausible does not
- Tradeoff: The dashboard and sub-1 KB script are more polished on Plausible
- Tradeoff: Umami's Cloud limits are unpublished, while Plausible's pricing is clear
Free both ways, hosted and self-hosted, and a self-host that needs no separate database server
GoatCounter is the smaller, simpler cousin of Plausible. Pageviews over time, top pages, referrers, countries, and screen sizes, cookieless, and nothing heavier. The hosted service is free for what the author calls reasonable public usage, and the self-hosted version is a single Go binary that runs on SQLite, so there is no ClickHouse and no second database to babysit. If Plausible felt like more tool and more setup than your blog needed, this is the honest step down.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Netherlands
- Open source (EUPL-1.2 (modified))
Netherlands- Best for:
- Personal sites and docs where you only ever wanted a visitor count
- The catch:
- The free hosted terms are defined only as "reasonable public usage" with no published number, and the pricing help page is currently a dead link.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Free hosted tier, where Plausible Cloud charges after 30 days
- Advantage: Self-hosts from a single binary on SQLite, no ClickHouse needed
- Advantage: Also cookieless, so no consent banner
- Tradeoff: No funnels, goals, or ecommerce metrics that Plausible offers
- Tradeoff: A solo project rather than a funded company like Plausible
- Tradeoff: The dashboard is plainer and the free limits are unpublished
Pay what you want, including nothing, with a stricter no-IP-logging privacy stance than Plausible
Counter.dev takes Plausible's privacy pitch a step further and drops the price to whatever you feel like paying. 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 with no published quotas, and the code is AGPL-3.0 like Plausible's. For a personal site, it is free in a way Plausible Cloud is not.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Germany
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Germany- Best for:
- Side projects where any billing relationship, even $9, feels like overkill
- The catch:
- It is a hobby-scale project by the author's own figures (€350 in donations across 26 payments in 2022), so do not make it load-bearing for a business.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Costs nothing unless you choose to pay, unlike Plausible Cloud
- Advantage: No IP logging at all, a stronger privacy stance than most
- Advantage: Also cookieless and AGPL-3.0 like Plausible
- Tradeoff: Far fewer features: no funnels, goals, or ecommerce metrics
- Tradeoff: Thinly funded, so plan for the service to change or stop
- Tradeoff: No published data retention policy, which Plausible documents
Everything Plausible leaves out, ecommerce revenue, visitor logs, replay, and heatmaps, free if you self-host
If you were about to buy Plausible's $19 Business tier for funnels and ecommerce revenue, Matomo gives you all of that and more for free, provided you self-host. The On-Premise edition is GPL-3.0 with unlimited hits and unlimited users, and it adds visitor-level logs, session recordings, and heatmaps that Plausible does not do. It installs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting, which is a lighter dependency list than Plausible's Postgres plus ClickHouse.
- From €29/month (as of July 2026)
- New Zealand
- Open source (GPL-3.0)
New Zealand- Best for:
- Ecommerce and data-heavy teams who found Plausible too shallow
- The catch:
- Free means running a PHP and MySQL server, Matomo Cloud starts at €29 per month, and some behaviour features are paid plugins even when self-hosted.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Ecommerce revenue and funnels included, not gated to a paid tier
- Advantage: Visitor-level logs, session recordings, and heatmaps Plausible lacks
- Advantage: Self-hosts on PHP and MySQL, no ClickHouse required
- Tradeoff: The interface is far heavier and more menu-driven than Plausible's
- Tradeoff: Matomo Cloud has no free tier either, and starts at €29 per month
- Tradeoff: Meters hits, not pageviews, so events and downloads count too
A published, genuinely free hosted tier of 1 million events a month, where Plausible Cloud has none
PostHog is more than Plausible in every direction, and its free tier is the one thing Plausible cannot match on price. You get 1 million events, 5,000 web session replays, and 1 million feature flag requests every month with no card required (as of July 2026). If your reason for leaving Plausible was that you wanted a free hosted option with room to grow, this is the most generous one on the list. It is also the heaviest.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT (with a proprietary ee/ directory))
- Best for:
- Product teams who want a free hosted tier and event depth, not just pageviews
- The catch:
- It is a product-analytics suite with a real learning curve, it uses cookies, and one noisy autocapture setting can burn a million events in a week.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Genuinely free hosted tier, unlike Plausible Cloud
- Advantage: Adds session replay, feature flags, and surveys Plausible does not have
- Advantage: SQL access to your own event data
- Tradeoff: Much heavier and harder to learn than Plausible's single page
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, so it does not remove the consent banner Plausible avoids
- Tradeoff: Events can overspend into a bill once you pass the free tier
Free forever session replay and heatmaps, the behaviour picture Plausible refuses to collect
Clarity is not a Plausible replacement and we would not sell it as one. Plausible tells you how many people came and where from. Clarity shows you what they did on the page: session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, and automated rage-click flags. It is free with no traffic limit and no paid tier. Most people run it next to a privacy analytics tool rather than instead of one, because the two answer different questions.
- Completely free (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Anyone who wants to see why a page converts badly, alongside their traffic numbers
- The catch:
- It uses cookies so the consent banner comes back, recordings are kept only 30 days, and Microsoft receives your visitors' behavioral data.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Session recordings and heatmaps, which Plausible does not do by design
- Advantage: Free forever with no traffic limit and no paid tier
- Worth knowing: Answers a different question, so it pairs with Plausible rather than replacing it
- Tradeoff: No acquisition, campaign, or aggregate traffic reporting like Plausible's
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, undoing the banner-free setup Plausible gives you
- Tradeoff: Behavioral data goes to Microsoft, against Plausible's privacy-first model
Actually free hosted at any volume, if you can accept the cookies Plausible was built to avoid
GA4 is the tool most Plausible users left in the first place, so listing it feels backwards, but it answers one real question: it is free hosted at any traffic level, which Plausible Cloud is not. If your budget matters more than your consent banner, GA4 costs nothing and does far more, including Google Ads and Search Console integration and BigQuery export. The price you pay is the exact thing Plausible removed.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Sites on a strict budget that also run Google Ads and can accept the tradeoffs
- The catch:
- It uses cookies, needs a consent banner and GDPR handling, its interface is complex, and explorations sample above 10 million events per query.
Compared to Plausible Analytics
- Advantage: Free hosted at any volume, unlike Plausible Cloud
- Advantage: Google Ads and Search Console integration Plausible does not offer
- Advantage: Free BigQuery export for teams that want raw data
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies and needs the consent banner Plausible removes
- Tradeoff: The GA4 interface is far more complex than Plausible's one page
- Tradeoff: Explorations sample above 10M events per query and retention caps at 14 months
How to choose
For most people the answer is Umami: it is the one tool here with a genuinely free hosted plan and an MIT license, so you get Plausible's cookieless dashboard without the trial clock running out. If you want something smaller that is free both ways, GoatCounter self-hosts from a single binary. If you need real depth like ecommerce revenue and visitor logs, self-host Matomo instead. And if you can live with Google's cookies, GA4 is free hosted, which Plausible Cloud is not.