sonex vs Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics is one of the tools that made the case for cookieless analytics before it was a category. It is deliberately minimal, hosted entirely in the Netherlands, and has an ongoing free plan. sonex differs in two places: revenue read from a payment provider, and the depth of the reports underneath. Everything on privacy is close to a tie.

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

At a glance

	sonex	Simple Analytics
Cookies	None	None
Consent banner	Not needed	Not needed
Entry price	$20/mo, 200k events	$20/mo, 100k+ page views
Extra users	Included in plan	+$20/month each
Free plan	2,000 events/mo, 6-month retention	1 user, 5 sites, 30-day history
Revenue from Stripe/Polar	Yes, all plans	Not documented
Funnels, retention, journeys	Yes	Not documented
Session-level views	Yes	Not documented
Compare two date ranges	Yes	Not documented
Geography	Country, region, city	Country
Data residency	Hosted SaaS	Netherlands only
Tracker size (brotli, measured)	2,968 bytes	3,407 bytes

Rows marked “not documented” mean exactly that — we could not confirm them from Simple Analytics’ own pages, and we are not going to assert a competitor lacks something on the basis of not finding it. Check with them if one of those rows is your deciding factor.

Where Simple Analytics is better

Data residency. “Website data never leaves the Netherlands” is a clear, checkable commitment, and for organisations with EU-only procurement requirements it settles a question that would otherwise take a month. We do not offer an equivalent guarantee.

Minimalism as the whole product. One page, everything on it, nothing to configure. That is a legitimate design position and some people want precisely that and nothing more. If our funnels and attribution reports read to you as clutter, they will not become features by being available.

A free plan with five websites. Ours allows one.

Where sonex is better

Revenue. Connect Stripe or Polar with a read-only key and earned money appears as a series beside the traffic on every plan including free. It is read from the provider’s API rather than from a tracked event, so it survives ad blockers and matches your actual deposits.

Seats. Simple Analytics charges $20 a month for each additional user. sonex includes ten seats on Pro and unlimited on Business. A team of four is $80 a month of user fees on their pricing and nothing on ours — worth putting in a spreadsheet before deciding.

Depth. Funnels, retention cohorts, attribution models, user journeys, session-level browsing, a compare mode for any two ranges, city-level geography, public shared dashboards, a query API, and GA4 or CSV imports.

Retention on the free plan. Thirty days of history against six months.

Privacy: a tie, honestly

Neither tool sets cookies. Neither fingerprints. Neither requires a consent banner. Both are built so that the ePrivacy storage trigger never fires, which is the structural reason the banner is unnecessary rather than a compliance argument either of us has to win.

Their script measured 3,407 bytes brotli against our 2,968 — a difference of 439 bytes, which will not affect anything.

Choose Simple Analytics if

• Dutch or strictly-EU data residency is a requirement rather than a preference.
• You want the most minimal dashboard available and consider extra reports a cost.
• You are one person with several small sites and want a free plan that covers them.

Choose sonex if

• You want revenue beside traffic, from your payment provider, on any plan.
• You have teammates — the per-seat charge adds up quickly.
• You want funnels, retention, attribution and sessions rather than a single page.
• You want city-level geography or a compare mode.

Facts checked against both products’ own pricing and documentation on 2026-08-17. Anything we could not confirm from a first-party page is marked “not documented” rather than claimed. Script sizes measured the same day.