The best privacy-friendly analytics tools in 2026

Every tool on this list counts your visitors without cookies, without fingerprinting and without a consent banner. That is the entry requirement, not the differentiator. What actually separates them is price shape, how long they keep your data, how much JavaScript they cost your visitors, and whether they have any concept of money.

We make one of these tools. So the numbers below are measured or taken from each vendor’s own pages on 2026-08-17, the recommendations are by situation rather than a ranking with us at the top, and we say plainly where someone else is better.

The short answer

If you want	Pick
Free, and your site does not sell anything	Cloudflare Web Analytics
Open source and self-hostable	Plausible
The whole enterprise feature set, self-hosted	Matomo
Unlimited data retention	Fathom
The cheapest paid entry point	Pirsch
Strict EU data residency	Simple Analytics
Zero setup on a Vercel deployment	Vercel Web Analytics
Revenue from Stripe or Polar beside your traffic	sonex

Measured script sizes

Brotli-compressed, because that is what a browser actually downloads. Fetched and compressed identically on 2026-08-17; the full method and the thirteen-tracker table are published separately.

Tool	Brotli bytes
Plausible	1,122
Vercel Web Analytics	1,125
Fathom	1,776
sonex	2,968
Pirsch	3,050
Simple Analytics	3,407
Cloudflare Web Analytics	10,034
Matomo Cloud	24,015
Google Analytics 4, for reference	122,345

The interesting fact in that table is not the ordering among the privacy tools — the gap between the top six is about two kilobytes, which will not change anything on your site. It is the order of magnitude between all of them and what most of the web is running.

The tools

Cloudflare Web Analytics — the best free option

Free on every Cloudflare plan, with no volume limit we could find. Cloudflare states it uses no client-side state such as cookies or localStorage and does not fingerprint individuals.

Good at: traffic volume, top pages, top countries, Core Web Vitals, at zero cost and zero risk. Not for: funnels, retention, attribution, session-level views or revenue — it does not attempt them. Pick it if: your site does not sell anything and you want the basics for free.

Plausible — the best open-source option

AGPLv3, built and hosted in the EU, self-hostable, and the lightest script we measured at 1,122 bytes. From $9/month at the 10,000-pageview band, with a 30-day trial and no ongoing free plan.

Good at: a clean single-page dashboard, transparency you can verify by reading the source, EU hosting as a default. Watch for: funnels, user journeys, revenue tracking and the Stats API are Business-tier features. Pick it if: open source matters to you, or you want to self-host something well-maintained.

Matomo — the deepest feature set

GPLv3 core, free to self-host forever; Cloud from €29/month excluding tax for 50,000 hits, in Frankfurt. Heatmaps, session recording, A/B testing, form analytics. Has an approved configuration under CNIL’s consent exemption in France.

Good at: replacing enterprise Google Analytics feature-for-feature, and full data sovereignty when self-hosted. Watch for: a 24,015-byte script, funnels and cohorts gated to Business and above on Cloud, and the real operational cost of self-hosting. Pick it if: you need to own the whole stack, or you need the enterprise feature list.

Fathom — the best retention

$45/month for up to 500,000 pageviews, 7-day trial, no ongoing free plan. Data kept unlimited while you are a customer, EU processing for EU visitors, independently owned with no outside capital.

Good at: keeping your history forever, a calm dashboard, a company with a long public track record. Watch for: the entry price, and revenue tracked through custom events rather than a payment provider. Pick it if: you want data that never expires from a company that has been doing this a long time.

Pirsch — the cheapest paid entry

$6/month for 10,000 page views, 50 websites and unlimited data retention on the entry plan. German hosting; tracking library is AGPLv3. 30-day trial, no ongoing free plan.

Good at: price, website count, unlimited retention, and A/B testing on the Plus tier. Watch for: funnels are Plus-tier, and there is no native payment-provider revenue sync. Pick it if: you run several small sites and want the lowest bill.

Simple Analytics — the strictest data residency

$20/month, plus $20/month per additional user. Ongoing free plan for one user, five websites and 30 days of history. Website data never leaves the Netherlands.

Good at: a clear, checkable data-residency commitment and a deliberately minimal dashboard. Watch for: the per-user charge, which adds up quickly for a team. Pick it if: EU-only residency is a procurement requirement.

Vercel Web Analytics — best if you already deploy there

50,000 events a month free on Hobby, $0.03 per 1,000 events on Pro. Cookieless, with a daily-rotating request hash. One of the two smallest scripts here.

Good at: one-click setup on a Vercel deployment and a genuinely generous free allowance. Watch for: one month of retention on Hobby, custom events gated to Pro, a $10/month per team add-on for longer history, and data tied to your hosting platform. Pick it if: you are on Vercel and 50,000 events a month covers you.

sonex — the one with revenue in it

Ours. Free for 2,000 events a month, $20/month for 200,000, $200/month for 2,000,000. No cookies, no consent banner, 2,968-byte script. Connect Stripe or Polar with a read-only key and revenue appears beside the traffic on every plan including free, read from the provider’s API rather than from a tracked event.

Good at: revenue beside traffic, funnels, retention cohorts, attribution models, sessions, journeys, compare mode, city-level geography, shared dashboards, a query API. Watch for: a small free allowance next to Vercel’s or PostHog’s, no self-hosting, no open source, and four tools on this list ship a lighter script. Pick it if: you sell something and want to know whether the traffic paid for itself.

What none of them will do for you

Escape ad blockers. EasyPrivacy carries rules against nearly every tool here — nine against Plausible, four against Fathom, two each against Simple Analytics, Matomo and Cloudflare, one each against Pirsch and Vercel. Being privacy-friendly is not a category the filter lists recognise. Every one of these tools undercounts, and the gap is largest for technical audiences.

Match each other’s numbers. Two analytics tools on the same site never agree, because they define a visit, a bounce and a unique visitor differently. Pick one and read it as a consistent index rather than a census.

Fix the rest of your consent problem. Removing an analytics cookie removes one trigger. Advertising pixels, embedded video and chat widgets each bring their own, and the banner only goes away when all of them do. Our cookie banner checker walks through which apply to your site.

How to choose in one minute

Ask two questions.

Does your site sell something? If not, take Cloudflare Web Analytics and stop reading. It is free and sufficient.

Do you need to own the infrastructure? If yes, it is Plausible or Matomo, depending on whether you want a simple tool or the full feature set.

If your site sells something and you do not need to self-host, the deciding question is whether you want revenue in the same view as traffic — and, if you do, whether the tool reads it from your payment provider or asks your visitors’ browsers to report it.

All prices, limits and features taken from each vendor’s own pages on 2026-08-17, and all script sizes measured the same day. These change; verify before deciding.