sonex vs Pirsch Analytics

sonex and Pirsch are the same kind of tool with one substantive gap between them. Pirsch is cheaper to start, hosts in Germany, and is more generous on websites and retention. sonex reads revenue natively from Stripe or Polar, which Pirsch does not do at all. If money beside traffic is why you are shopping, that gap is the decision.

Checked against both products’ own pages on 2026-08-17.

At a glance

	sonex	Pirsch
Cookies	None	None
Consent banner	Not needed	Not needed
Entry price	$20/mo, 200k events	$6/mo, 10k page views
Free plan	2,000 events/mo, ongoing	30-day trial, then paid
Websites on entry plan	20	50
Data retention	6 months free, 1 year Pro, 5 years Business	Unlimited on all plans
Native revenue from Stripe/Polar	Yes, all plans	No — manual conversion events
Funnels	Yes, Pro	Plus tier ($12/mo)
Retention cohorts	Yes	Not documented
Attribution models	Yes	Not documented
A/B testing	No	Plus tier
Tracker size (brotli, measured)	2,968 bytes	3,050 bytes
Hosting	Hosted SaaS	Germany; on-premise on Enterprise
Open source	No	Tracking library AGPLv3; SaaS backend closed

The revenue gap

Pirsch tracks revenue the way most analytics tools do: you fire a custom conversion event with a value attached, and it counts what the browser told it.

That works, and it inherits two problems. Client-side purchase events are lost whenever the tracker is blocked — and Pirsch, like every tool in this category, carries EasyPrivacy rules. They are also lost when a checkout completes on the payment provider’s own domain, or when a tab closes before the beacon fires.

sonex reads revenue from Stripe’s or Polar’s API instead. The payment provider is a system of record: it knows exactly what arrived, net of refunds, and it is never blocked because the money already moved. That number is available on every plan including free, and it requires no event instrumentation at all.

If you do not care about revenue in your analytics, this section does not matter and Pirsch is a strong, cheaper tool.

Where Pirsch is better

Entry price. $6/month against $20/month. At small volumes that is a meaningful difference.

Websites. Fifty on the entry plan against our twenty on Pro. If you run a portfolio of small sites, Pirsch is built for you in a way we are not.

Retention. Unlimited on every Pirsch plan. Ours is six months on free, a year on Pro, five years on Business. For anyone who wants to look back at year four, that is a clear win for them.

German hosting and on-premise. Data in Germany by default, with an on-premise option on Enterprise. If your procurement requires EU-only processing or self-hosting, Pirsch answers it and we do not.

A/B testing. Included on their Plus tier. We have no equivalent.

Where sonex is better

Revenue, as above. Native, on every plan, from a system of record.

Report depth. Retention cohorts, an attribution report with selectable models, user journeys, session-level browsing and a compare mode for any two date ranges. Pirsch documents funnels and session analysis; the rest is not part of its product.

A free plan that does not expire. 2,000 events a month, ongoing. Pirsch’s 30-day trial is generous but ends.

Event-based billing that covers custom events. Ours counts pageviews and custom events in one allowance. Pirsch counts page views plus custom events plus 10% of session-extension events, which is worth modelling against your own mix before assuming either is cheaper.

Privacy: effectively a tie

Both set no cookies, do no fingerprinting, and require no consent banner. Pirsch claims GDPR, CCPA, PECR and Schrems II compliance out of the box; sonex takes the same position for the same structural reason, which is that neither of us writes anything to the visitor’s device.

Their script measured 3,050 bytes brotli to our 2,968 — a difference of 82 bytes, which is to say no difference at all. Both are on the honest end of this market.

Choose Pirsch if

• You want the lowest entry price, or you run many small sites.
• Unlimited data retention matters to you.
• You need German hosting or an on-premise option.
• A/B testing is on your list, and revenue is not.

Choose sonex if

• You want revenue read from Stripe or Polar beside your traffic, on every plan.
• You want retention cohorts, attribution models and journeys, not just funnels.
• You want a free plan you can leave running indefinitely.

These are both small, honest tools that took the same position on privacy. The question is only whether you need the money in the picture.

Facts checked against both products’ own pricing, feature and documentation pages on 2026-08-17. Script sizes measured the same day.