sonex vs Datafast

Datafast and sonex are the two products currently arguing that analytics should lead with money rather than visits. If you are choosing between them, the honest summary is short: Datafast has broader payment-provider support and a set of founder-workflow features sonex does not have. sonex reads revenue without ever identifying a visitor, and gives you the deeper analytics reports underneath it.

The rest of this is the detail behind that, with everything checked against both products’ own pages on 2026-08-17.

At a glance

	sonex	Datafast
Revenue beside traffic	Yes, all plans including free	Yes
Payment providers	Stripe, Polar	Stripe, LemonSqueezy, Polar, Shopify, custom API
Default script uses cookies	No	Yes; a separate cookieless script is offered
Consent banner needed	No	With the default script, generally yes
Entry price	$20/mo for 200k events	$9/mo for 10k events
Ongoing free plan	2,000 events/mo	No — 14-day trial
Websites on entry paid plan	20	1
Data retention	6 months free, 1 year Pro, 5 years Business	3 years Starter, 5+ years Growth
Funnels, retention, journeys	Yes	Funnels, goals and journeys
Session-level views	Yes	Live visitor view
Public shared dashboards	Yes	Not documented
Query API	Yes	Account and website API, CLI and MCP server

The difference that actually matters: how revenue meets traffic

This is the whole comparison, and it is a genuine architectural choice rather than a feature gap.

Datafast follows the visitor. Its default script sets cookies so a person who arrives from a campaign today and buys next week can be connected to that campaign. That gives you per-visitor revenue attribution across a long window, which is the strongest version of the thing both products promise.

Datafast is refreshingly direct about the cost. Their own documentation says the cookieless alternative is “less accurate than the default script, especially for revenue attribution over weeks or months, because visitor identifiers rotate about every 24 hours.” That is an accurate description of the trade, and every cookieless tool faces it.

sonex reads the total instead. Revenue is pulled from Stripe’s or Polar’s API in aggregate and plotted on the same axis as traffic. No visitor is identified to produce it, no cookie is set, and no consent banner is triggered — because the number never came from a browser in the first place.

The two approaches answer subtly different questions:

Question	Datafast default	sonex
Did revenue move with traffic this month?	Yes	Yes
Which channel earned the most, this visit?	Yes	Yes, via a conversion event
Which channel earned the most, six weeks later?	Yes	No
Does it need a cookie banner?	Generally yes	No

If multi-week per-visitor attribution is the reason you are buying analytics, Datafast’s default configuration does something sonex deliberately will not do. We think the aggregate view answers most of the real question without asking your visitors for anything, but that is a judgement, and yours may differ.

Payment providers

Datafast wins this outright. It lists native Stripe, LemonSqueezy, Polar and Shopify support plus a custom payment API for anything else. sonex supports Stripe and Polar.

If you sell through Shopify or LemonSqueezy, that is close to decisive and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Pricing

Datafast’s Starter is $9/month for 10,000 monthly events with one website and three years of retention; Growth is $19/month for 30 websites and 5+ years. There is a 14-day trial and no ongoing free plan.

sonex is free forever for 2,000 events on one website, $20/month for 200,000 events across 20 websites, and $200/month for 2,000,000 events with unlimited seats.

Reading that fairly:

• Under 10,000 events a month, Datafast’s entry price is less than half of ours.
• At 200,000 events, we cannot quote a Datafast price, because their volume pricing lives behind an interactive slider we could not read reliably. Check it against your own volume rather than trusting either of us.
• If you want to run analytics indefinitely without paying, sonex has a free plan and Datafast has a trial.
• If you run many sites, one website on Datafast’s Starter against twenty on our Pro is a real gap.

Reports underneath the revenue

Both cover funnels, goals and journeys. sonex adds retention cohorts, an attribution report with selectable models, session-level browsing, a compare mode for any two date ranges, a country/region/city map, public shared dashboards, a query API, and GA4 or CSV imports.

Datafast adds things sonex does not have at all: AI bot traffic reporting, social mentions, X-link attribution, a CLI, an MCP server for AI-agent access, and a live visitor view with purchase-probability indicators.

These are different products underneath a similar pitch. Datafast is a focused revenue-attribution tool with founder-workflow features around it. sonex is a full analytics product that leads with revenue.

Privacy posture

sonex sets no cookies, writes nothing to device storage, does no fingerprinting, and derives visitor identity from a hash that rotates daily. That is why no consent banner is required — not a claim of exemption, but the absence of the thing that triggers the requirement under the ePrivacy Directive.

Datafast states it is “built so you can use it in line with GDPR expectations” and offers the cookieless script for sites that want to avoid a banner, with the accuracy caveat quoted above. Running that script puts Datafast in broadly the same position as sonex on consent, and in the same position on long-window attribution too.

Neither of us escapes ad blockers, incidentally. Both datafa.st and our own analysis of the filter lists confirm Datafast carries EasyPrivacy rules; we published the full study, including the fact that we are unblocked only because we are new.

Choose Datafast if

• You sell through Shopify or LemonSqueezy.
• Multi-week per-visitor revenue attribution is the specific thing you are buying, and you are comfortable with the cookie banner that its default configuration implies.
• You are under 10,000 events a month and want the lowest entry price.
• The CLI, MCP server or social-mention features fit how you work.

Choose sonex if

• You want revenue beside traffic with no cookies, no banner and no identity trade — and the aggregate view answers your question.
• You want the analytics underneath it: retention, attribution models, sessions, journeys, compare mode, shared dashboards, a query API.
• You run more than one site, or want a free plan that does not expire.
• You are on Stripe or Polar.

Both of us are small companies arguing the same thing about what analytics should lead with, which is more agreement than disagreement. Pick on the two questions that actually differ: which payment provider you use, and whether following individual visitors for weeks is worth a consent banner to you.

Facts checked against both products’ own pricing and documentation pages on 2026-08-17. Prices and features change — verify before deciding.