# 7 best free website analytics tools in 2026, honestly compared

> The 7 best free website analytics tools compared: what each one gives away, what sits behind a paywall, what it cannot measure, and who it actually suits.

Canonical page: https://statsy.co/blog/best-free-website-analytics-tools  
Published: 24 September 2026  
Author: Manish Sharma, Founder, Statsy  
Category: Tools  
Tags: tools, analytics-basics

**In short:** Seven options worth your time: Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity, Cloudflare Web Analytics, Umami, Matomo, Plausible and Statsy. Three are permanently free and hosted, two are free only if you self-host, and two are paid with trials. All of them count traffic well. Almost none of them connect that traffic to revenue, which is the gap to plan around.

## Which free website analytics tools are actually free?

Free means two different things in this market, and the difference decides whether you get a bill in a month. Some free website analytics tools are permanently free hosted products. Others are open source programs that cost nothing to download but need a server, a database and your attention. A third group is only free to try, and gets listed as free by roundups that never read the pricing page.

Sort every option into one of three buckets before you compare a single feature:

- **Permanently free and hosted.** Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity and Cloudflare Web Analytics. Someone else runs the servers and you pay nothing at any traffic volume. You accept their limits and their data policies in exchange.
- **Free to self-host.** Umami and Matomo. The software is open source and the license costs nothing. Your costs are a small virtual machine, a database, upgrades, backups and the hour you lose when something breaks on a Sunday.
- **Free to trial only.** Plausible, Fathom and Statsy. You get the full product for a fixed window, then you pick a plan or you stop.

That framing matters because free tools rarely fail on features. They fail on the one number a small business actually needs, which is how much money each traffic source produced. Almost every free option counts visits and stops there.

## Is Google Analytics 4 still the best free option?

GA4 is still the most capable free option by raw feature count, and still the most tedious to learn. It costs nothing at any volume, reports on every channel, connects to Google Ads and Search Console, and exports raw events to BigQuery for free.

What is free: everything in a standard property. Reports, explorations, audiences, ecommerce tracking, custom events, the BigQuery export, Google Signals.

What is not free: your history. Standard properties retain event-level data for 2, 14 or 26 months and user-level data for 2 or 14 months only, per [Google's data retention documentation](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196). Large and XL properties are capped at 2 months regardless of the setting, and the two-month limit always applies to age, gender and interest data. Aggregate reports live longer, but ad hoc exploration of old events does not.

The other limits are practical. GA4 sets cookies by default, so a consent banner is part of the deal in the EU and UK. Its definitions take work: "bounce rate" is the inverse of engagement rate, and an engaged session is one that lasts 10 seconds or longer, fires a conversion event, or has two or more pageviews ([Google](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/12195621)). Average engagement time per session is engagement time divided by sessions ([Google](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11109416)). Learn those three sentences and half the confusion goes away.

Who it suits: anyone spending money on Google Ads, and anyone who wants raw event data in a warehouse without paying for the pipeline. If GA4 is the thing you are trying to leave, we keep notes on the [Google Analytics alternative](/google-analytics-alternative) question.

## What does Microsoft Clarity give you for free?

Clarity is the most generous product in this list because it gives away the part that is normally expensive: session recordings and heatmaps. Microsoft's documentation states plainly that Clarity "is a free service forever" with "no obligation to upgrade to a paid version" ([Clarity docs](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/setup-and-installation/about-clarity)).

What is free: session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, event and funnel tracking, Copilot summaries of recordings and heatmaps, and segmentation. There is no traffic tier to outgrow and no seat limit to hit.

What is not: Clarity is behavior analytics, not traffic or revenue analytics. It will show you a visitor rage-clicking a dead button. It will not tell you that the button sits on the page your Reddit traffic lands on, or that Reddit traffic converts at a third the rate of your newsletter. Channel reporting is thin, and there is no revenue anywhere in the product.

Two practical notes. Clarity sets cookies, so it sits behind your consent banner exactly like GA4. Microsoft also states Clarity should not be used on websites or apps targeting users under the age of 18.

Who it suits: everyone, as a second tool. Run it next to something that counts traffic properly. If you are replacing a paid behavior tool rather than adding one, the trade-offs are in our [Hotjar alternative](/hotjar-alternative) write-up.

## Is Cloudflare Web Analytics enough on its own?

For a marketing site with no signup and no checkout, yes. For anything that makes money, no. Cloudflare Web Analytics is free with no limits based on traffic volume, and it no longer requires you to move DNS to Cloudflare. You paste a snippet like any other tag.

It is genuinely cookieless. Cloudflare states the product does not track individuals over time, does not use client-side state such as cookies or localStorage, and does not fingerprint people via IP address or User-Agent string ([Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-first-web-analytics/)). Rather than counting unique IPs, it counts page views whose referrer is a different site to approximate visits. That is a real methodological trade: the visit count is an approximation by design.

What is free: top pages, countries, device types, referrers, page views and visits, plus Core Web Vitals measured on real visitors.

What is not there at all: goals, funnels, custom events, revenue, replays, retention reporting. There is no way to answer "which campaign earned $412 last week."

Who it suits: documentation sites, portfolios, open source project pages, and anyone who wants an honest traffic number without a consent banner. Of all the website analytics tools online, it is the lowest-effort install that still respects visitors by default.

## Should you self-host Umami?

Self-host Umami if you are comfortable running a small app and a Postgres database, and you want a clean cookieless dashboard you own outright. It is MIT licensed, and the repository lists Node.js 18.18 or higher and PostgreSQL 12.14 or higher as requirements ([umami-software/umami](https://github.com/umami-software/umami)).

What is free: the entire self-hosted product. Umami's documentation describes analytics "without cookies, cross-site tracking, or the automatic collection of personal data," covering pageviews, visitors, referrers, locations, devices, real-time activity, custom events, journeys, session replays and heatmaps ([Umami docs](https://docs.umami.is/docs/)). That feature list is unusually deep for something you can run for the price of a small VPS.

Umami Cloud is the hosted version, and you can create a free account there, with paid tiers above it. Check their site for the current allowances rather than trusting a number in a blog post.

What is not free: your time. Self-hosting means you own uptime, upgrades, backups and database growth. Analytics writes constantly. A Postgres instance nobody maintains gets slow, and when it gets slow your dashboard goes with it, usually in the week you are trying to report on a launch.

Who it suits: developers who already run infrastructure, agencies hosting dashboards for clients, and anyone whose objection to hosted analytics is data ownership rather than price.

## When is Matomo worth the setup?

Matomo is worth it when you need GA4's depth on hardware you control, which in practice means a compliance requirement. Matomo On-Premise "is, and forever will remain free to download" ([Matomo](https://matomo.org/faq/on-premise/)), and it is the most feature-complete open source analytics platform available.

What is free: visits and visitor profiles, ecommerce tracking with order and product revenue, goals, segmentation, a full reporting API, and log import so you can process server access logs instead of relying on JavaScript. Log import is a genuine advantage: it sees traffic that blockers strip.

What is not free: premium plugins and Matomo Cloud. Several features people assume are core, including heatmaps and session recording, are paid plugins.

The cookie question deserves care. Matomo can run cookieless via a `disableCookies()` call, and Matomo's own FAQ is blunt about the cost. Without cookies, visitor recognition falls back to IP address and browser footprint, which is inaccurate; multi-visit attribution breaks, so conversions get credited to the channel used in the visit that converted rather than the one that started the journey; and Multi Attribution and Cohort reports stop working ([Matomo](https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_156/)).

Who it suits: organizations with a legal requirement to keep analytics data in a specific jurisdiction, and teams large enough that maintaining it is somebody's actual job.

## Is Plausible free, or only free to try?

Plausible is paid. It appears constantly in lists of free site analytics tools, and that is simply wrong. Plausible's documentation states the trial runs 30 days with no credit card required, after which you choose a Starter, Growth, Business or Enterprise plan ([Plausible docs](https://plausible.io/docs/subscription-plans)). Read their pricing page for current numbers rather than trusting any blog post, this one included.

What you get: cookieless tracking by default, a single-page dashboard that loads fast, goals, campaign reporting, and revenue tracking on the Business plan. Revenue is reported from the browser, either with a CSS class on a button or a `window.plausible()` call carrying an amount and currency, with a server-side Events API also available ([Plausible docs](https://plausible.io/docs/ecommerce-revenue-tracking)).

What is genuinely free: the source code. Plausible publishes a self-hosted community edition, so "free" applies on exactly the same terms as Umami and Matomo. You run it, you maintain it, you pay for the server.

Who it suits: teams that want a simple privacy-first dashboard and are happy to pay for hosting it properly. If you are comparing it against paid options, we keep a [Plausible alternative](/plausible-alternative) page.

## Where does Statsy fit if it has no free plan?

Statsy is not free and does not pretend to be. There is a 14-day trial with every feature included, no free plan, and plans start at $9 a month for 10,000 events. Including it in a list of free website analytics tools would be dishonest, so here is the honest placement: it is the paid option worth considering once a free tool has told you traffic is up and you still cannot tell whether revenue followed.

The difference sits in where money comes from. Statsy counts revenue only from signed payment webhooks (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, Razorpay) or an authenticated Payment API, never from an amount reported by the browser. A blocked script or an edited page cannot move the number. Every free tool above that reports revenue takes it from the page.

Around that sit five attribution models (last touch, first touch, linear, time decay and position based) with a lookback window from 1 to 365 days, default 90, plus goals, funnels, visitor journeys, session replays and heatmaps with a revenue overlay, and live visitors on a globe. The script is about 3 KB gzipped and loads with defer.

Cookieless mode is applied automatically to visitors from the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland and to browsers sending Global Privacy Control; other visitors get a first-party cookie so returning visitors and long purchase paths still match. Visitor IP addresses are never stored, raw events and sessions are kept 90 days, and data is never sold or used for advertising. The details are in the [docs](/docs) and on the [pricing](/pricing) page.

## What does "free" actually cost you?

Free never means zero cost. It means the cost does not arrive as an invoice. Three costs show up instead.

**Time.** A self-hosted install is a weekend to set up and an hour a month forever: upgrades, TLS renewals, database growth, a migration when the schema changes. At $9 to $20 a month for a hosted tool, roughly twenty minutes of your time per month buys the same outcome. Self-host because you want the data on your hardware, not because you want to save money.

**Data.** Free hosted tools are free for a reason that is usually written in the terms. Read what the vendor may do with aggregated data, whether it feeds an advertising graph, and where it is stored. Cloudflare and Clarity publish clear positions. Check them yourself rather than taking a roundup's word.

**The ceiling.** Analytics history does not migrate. When you switch tools you start a new dataset, and a year-over-year comparison disappears for a year. That is the real switching cost, and it grows every month you delay. If you already know you will need revenue attribution at some point, running the future tool in parallel now is cheaper than replacing history later.

## How do these free site analytics tools compare?

| Tool | Free tier | Cookieless | Revenue data |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Google Analytics 4 | Free at any volume, 2 to 26 month event retention | No, cookies by default | Yes, from browser ecommerce events |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free forever, no traffic cap | No, uses cookies | No |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Free, no traffic limits | Yes, no client-side state | No |
| Umami | Free self-hosted, MIT licensed | Yes | Yes, from tracked events |
| Matomo | Free On-Premise, premium plugins paid | Optional, attribution degrades | Yes, ecommerce tracking |
| Plausible | No free plan, 30-day trial | Yes | Yes, browser reported, Business plan |
| Statsy | No free plan, 14-day trial | Automatic for EU, EEA, UK, CH and GPC | Yes, from signed payment webhooks |

Read the last column first. Only four of the seven report revenue at all, and three of those take the figure from the visitor's browser, which means a blocked script or a tampered page changes your reported income. That is the structural reason free site analytics tools stay traffic tools: counting page views is cheap, and reconciling money against a payment processor is not.

Read the cookie column second, because it decides whether you need a consent banner and how much work your privacy notice becomes.

## What do free website analytics tools online still not tell you?

They tell you what happened and almost never why it paid. Four gaps show up repeatedly once a site starts earning.

- **Money by source.** Traffic reports rank channels by visits. Visits and revenue rank differently, often in close to opposite order. Without payment-side data you can optimize the wrong channel for months and see the graph go up the whole time.
- **Long purchase paths.** A B2B trial that converts on day 40 is invisible to a tool with a 30-day window or no persistent identifier at all. A lookback window you control matters more than dashboard design.
- **Blocked traffic.** Content blockers strip GA4 and other well-known endpoints. Every tool here undercounts, and the undercount is not evenly spread: a developer-focused site loses far more than a retail one, so cross-tool comparisons mislead.
- **Bots.** Free tools filter known crawlers with varying enthusiasm. A traffic spike that does not move revenue or signups is usually automated.

None of this makes free website analytics tools online useless. It makes them the first layer. Most small companies run a free traffic tool plus Clarity for a year, then hit the question neither answers, which is [marketing attribution](/marketing-attribution-software).

## What should you do next?

1. Install one traffic tool today. Cloudflare Web Analytics for zero configuration and no consent banner, GA4 if you spend on Google Ads, Umami if you would rather own the database.
2. Add Microsoft Clarity next to it. It is free forever, takes five minutes, and recordings answer questions a traffic chart never will.
3. Tag every campaign link with UTM parameters: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term and utm_content ([Google's reference](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10917952)). Free tools can only group traffic you have labeled.
4. Write down one revenue question your current setup cannot answer, such as "which channel produced last month's paying customers." Date it.
5. When the free tool still cannot answer it in ninety days, run a paid trial against the same traffic. Statsy's [14-day trial](/register) includes every feature, and [Stripe revenue attribution](/stripe-revenue-attribution) is the specific thing worth testing.

## Questions people ask

### What is the best free website analytics tool?

Google Analytics 4 for feature depth at no cost, Cloudflare Web Analytics for a cookieless number with no setup, Microsoft Clarity for free recordings and heatmaps. Most small sites run Cloudflare or GA4 plus Clarity together.

### Is Google Analytics 4 completely free?

Yes, GA4 is free at any traffic volume, including the BigQuery export. The limit is retention: standard properties keep event-level data for 2, 14 or 26 months and user-level data for 2 or 14 months, per Google's documentation.

### Is Plausible free?

No. Plausible has no free plan. It offers a 30-day trial with no credit card required, then requires a paid Starter, Growth, Business or Enterprise subscription. The self-hosted community edition is free if you run it on your own server.

### Which free analytics tools do not use cookies?

Cloudflare Web Analytics and Umami are cookieless by default. Matomo can be switched to cookieless, but its own documentation warns that visitor recognition and multi-visit attribution degrade badly when you do. GA4 and Clarity both use cookies.

### Can free analytics tools track revenue?

Some can, but they take the amount from the visitor's browser, so blockers and page edits distort it. Tools that read revenue from signed payment webhooks, such as Statsy, are paid. Statsy has a 14-day trial and no free plan.

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Statsy (https://statsy.co) · More posts: https://statsy.co/blog