Google Analytics is the default way the web measures itself, and the free tier is genuinely powerful: funnels, audiences, attribution, all wired into Google's ad stack. The cost shows up elsewhere. Your visitor data lives on Google's servers and feeds an advertising business, which is what forces the cookie banner onto every page and turns GA4 into a GDPR conversation with your legal team - and once traffic gets serious, the reports quietly start sampling, so the numbers you act on are estimates, not counts.
The open source alternatives below keep the analytics on infrastructure you run. Pageviews and events land in a database you own, so there is nothing to consent away and no third party reselling the behavior of your audience. Several measure visits without cookies at all, which retires the banner entirely, and because you hold the raw hits, the totals are exact rather than sampled no matter how large the site gets.
Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused web analytics platform and an open source alternative to Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Amplitude. It tracks site traffic without cookies, so there is no cookie banner to add, and the dashboard stays clean and easy to read.
PostHog is an open source, all-in-one platform for building products. It brings product analytics, web analytics, session replay, error tracking, feature flags, experiments, surveys, a data warehouse, data pipelines, AI observability, and workflows together in one stack.
Plausible Analytics tracks website traffic, goals, and conversions without cookies or persistent identifiers. It measures traffic rather than individuals, stores no personal data or IP addresses, and is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. All key insights sit on a single page with no menus to navigate.
Matomo is a free/libre web analytics platform for tracking websites and apps. It positions itself as the leading open-source alternative to Google Analytics, with full data ownership and privacy built in, and is already used on more than a million websites.
Rybbit is open source web and product analytics that tracks site and product usage without cookies, a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics that takes a couple of minutes to set up. The dashboard covers the core metrics: sessions, unique users, pageviews, bounce rate, and session duration.
OpenPanel is an open-source web and product analytics platform that combines the power of Mixpanel with the ease of Plausible, positioned as an alternative to Mixpanel and Google Analytics. It brings analytics, alerts, and dashboards into one place, with optional self-hosting.
GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free hosted service or a self-hosted app. It gives site owners meaningful, privacy-friendly traffic statistics without tracking visitors through unique identifiers, and it is lightweight enough to add only about 3.5K to a page.
Ackee is a self-hosted analytics tool for websites that runs on your own server. It analyzes traffic and provides statistics in a minimal interface for people who do not want a full marketing analytics platform or unique-user tracking. Tracked data is kept anonymized, and no cookies are required.
Swetrix is a privacy-focused, cookieless web analytics platform that tracks site traffic while storing all data anonymized. It is GDPR-compliant by design, uses no cross-device tracking, and gives a real-time dashboard with no sampling.
