Which hosted web analytics software to choose

Plausible Analytics suits a business owner or publisher who wants to understand a website in a few minutes rather than learn a reporting system. Traffic sources, popular pages, campaigns and conversions share a compact dashboard. Clicking through a source or page filters the results, so a reader can follow a question without constructing a custom report.

Its European operation is unusually straightforward. Plausible processes visitor data on infrastructure owned by European companies and keeps that data in the EU. Tracking uses no cookies or persistent visitor identifiers. Pirsch offers a similarly clear EU-storage arrangement; Fathom stores anonymized analytics in the US, while Umami uses servers in the US and EU.

The entry price needs a plan-name caveat. Starter begins at $9 a month for one site, but funnels, user journeys and revenue attribution belong to Business, which starts at $19 a month (as of November 2026). That plan also lets you filter by custom details attached to events, such as a product category, and query report data from your own software through the Stats API. Business also allows ten sites and ten team members. If you run many low-traffic client sites, Pirsch or Fathom gives you a larger site allowance for less.

Moving from Google Analytics 4 is easier than moving raw data out later. Plausible imports GA4 history, and every plan can export dashboard reports as CSV files. The Stats API requires Business. You can download aggregated CSV reports on every plan, while scheduled exports of individual events require a custom Enterprise plan. A one-off busy month is less worrying: Plausible does not stop collection or add a surprise charge, and it asks for an upgrade only when high usage continues.

Fathom Analytics is the closest alternative to Plausible for a reader who wants a polished, uncomplicated dashboard. It shows popular pages, traffic sources, campaign results and events on one page. Filters answer follow-up questions, and saved views preserve a report you check every week. Fathom is cloud-only, so there is no current self-hosted edition to maintain.

Every plan includes the same analytics features and at least 50 websites. The $15-a-month starting plan covers 100,000 page views and custom events combined (as of November 2026). An all-sites view gives an agency a portfolio summary, while scheduled emails can combine only the sites selected for each client. That makes Fathom easier to hand to clients than Umami and less restrictive about site count than Plausible.

Its conversion reports stop at events and their monetary values. You can measure purchases and campaign conversions, but you cannot build the multi-step funnels available in Umami, Plausible Business or Pirsch Plus. If the central question is where visitors abandon a checkout or signup sequence, Fathom is the wrong choice despite its excellent everyday reports.

Fathom’s privacy arrangement deserves a precise reading. It uses no cookies and processes EU visitors’ personal data in the EU, but stores the resulting anonymized analytics on US infrastructure. That may be perfectly acceptable; it is not the same as Plausible or Pirsch keeping the stored data in the EU. Fathom can import GA4 history, although the importer leaves out GA events and does not recreate every report, and imported data supports fewer filters.

Pirsch Analytics is the strongest choice for an agency, consultant or business with a collection of small websites. Standard starts at $6 a month for 10,000 monthly page views and includes 50 websites and unlimited members (as of November 2026). Its one-page dashboard lets a reader click a page, source or other dimension to filter the whole report, then save that view for later.

Standard already includes custom events, conversion goals, session summaries, automatic email reports and private dashboard links. Plus adds funnels, ecommerce revenue and extensive white-labeling, which replaces Pirsch’s branding with your own on client dashboards and reports. It also adds Teams, which groups several client dashboards under shared member permissions and a common theme rather than requiring a separate invitation to each dashboard. That makes Plus the more relevant agency plan. Neither Plausible nor Fathom matches this combination of included sites and branding at Pirsch’s self-serve prices.

Privacy and data location are also strong. Pirsch uses IP addresses and browser information only briefly to create an anonymous, site-specific visitor identifier, then discards them. Analytics data stays on German-owned servers in Germany. This gives an EU buyer a simpler storage answer than Fathom or Umami provides.

The catch is the usage cap. Page views and custom events consume the allowance. Optional session keep-alive requests, mainly useful for long-running apps, count at one-tenth of a page view each; Pirsch does not recommend enabling them for ordinary websites. When you reach it, Pirsch restricts the history you can see and continues collecting for only five more days; without an upgrade or a monthly reset, collection stops. A portfolio with unpredictable traffic therefore needs more headroom than its attractive entry price suggests, or a more forgiving service such as Plausible.

Umami Cloud is the best free starting point for a small site that wants more than page and referrer counts. The Hobby plan includes 100,000 monthly events for one website, with six months of history (as of November 2026). It also includes the core funnels, goals, campaign, journey, retention, revenue and reports that connect conversions to marketing sources that other services often reserve for paid tiers.

Those reports make Umami a more capable marketing tool than Fathom and a more affordable one than Plausible Business. They also create more to learn: custom dashboards, breakdowns, cohorts and journey reports ask the reader to understand more analytics concepts than a one-page summary requires. Plausible is the better recommendation when a client will read the dashboard unaided.

Pro costs $20 a month and includes one million events, 20 websites, ten team members, two years of history, API access and email reports. Estimate event usage before choosing between Umami and a page-view plan. A page view or custom event counts once, and every property saved with an event counts again. For example, one signup event stored with three properties consumes four event units. Extra Pro events have a published per-event charge, and collection continues when you pass the included amount. A monthly spending budget can instead stop recording once estimated costs reach your chosen limit.

Migration and departure are unusually well covered. Pro includes vendor-assisted imports from CSV exports and self-hosted Umami databases; Umami names Google Analytics, Plausible and Matomo among its migration sources. It also provides a full underlying-data export rather than only summarized dashboard reports. The free plan omits imports and API access, and its six-month history cannot support a year-over-year comparison.

Matomo Cloud is for a marketing team that finds the other dashboards too narrow. Alongside traffic sources and campaigns, its hosted plans include funnels, user flows, ecommerce, custom reports and dimensions, segmentation, cohorts, conversion credit across marketing channels and roll-up reporting across sites. Matomo also supports visitor-level APIs, a Google Analytics importer and scheduled email reports.

This is an important difference from Matomo On-Premise: advanced capabilities that appear as paid plugins in the self-hosted product are included in the Cloud subscription. Matomo Cloud’s Business plan starts at $26 a month before tax (as of November 2026), with 30 websites and 30 team members. Heatmaps and session recordings have separate monthly usage allowances, while raw visitor data is kept for 24 months and report data indefinitely.

The same breadth makes Matomo the hardest service here for a casual reader. An owner who wants a weekly summary of popular pages and successful campaigns will face far more menus, settings and specialist terms than Plausible or Fathom presents. Matomo earns its higher price when you already need those specialist reports, not merely because its feature list is longer.

Matomo stores Cloud data in Frankfurt, Germany, but its default tracking uses first-party cookies. Cookie-free tracking and use without a consent banner are possible only after configuring Matomo and meeting its documented privacy conditions. The other ranked services avoid analytics cookies by default. Matomo also counts page views, events, downloads, outbound clicks and other tracking requests as billable hits, so its traffic allowance cannot be compared directly with a page-view figure.

GoatCounter is a good fit for a blog, documentation site or small business that mainly wants to know which pages people read and which sites or campaigns sent them. Its hosted service is free for reasonable public usage, explicitly including personal sites and small-to-medium businesses. Donations pay for the servers. The interface also has an explicit commitment to working well with screen readers.

It offers unusually flexible collection for a free hosted tool. Besides the normal script, GoatCounter can count visits through an image when JavaScript is unavailable, receive page views from your website’s backend, or import web-server logs. Every individual page view can be exported as CSV, and its API exposes both statistics and site management.

The reports are deliberately basic. Custom events and campaign parameters are available, but GoatCounter does not provide the funnel analysis and reports connecting revenue to marketing sources that Umami, Plausible or Matomo offers. Choose it to understand readership rather than to manage an ecommerce marketing program. Umami’s free plan is the better fit when conversion reports matter.

GoatCounter’s operating terms also need more judgment than a normal price tier. It is not intended for millions of daily page views, and the project suggests self-hosting for heavier or more demanding use. Separate domains normally need separate GoatCounter sites, with no standard all-sites dashboard to unite them. Those limits are reasonable for a donation-supported service, but an agency or a business that needs a committed capacity plan should choose a paid provider.