Google Analytics Alternatives
Google Analytics 4 is powerful and free, but the cost shows up elsewhere. You pay in cookie banners, sampled data, a steep learning curve and the fact that your visitor data lives on Google servers. If any of that grates, here are the alternatives worth a look.
What to look for
A good GA replacement should be light on your site, honest about privacy and simple enough to read at a glance. The best options drop cookies entirely, which means no consent banner and full compliance with GDPR, CCPA and PECR out of the box.
The short list
- YourTraffic. Open-source and cookie-free, with unlimited projects, a REST API and a native MCP server for AI agents. Self-host it for free or run it in the cloud.
- Plausible. A clean hosted option focused on the essentials.
- Simple Analytics. Minimal dashboard, privacy-first, hosted only.
- Fathom. Fast and simple, aimed at small teams.
- Matomo. Feature-heavy and self-hostable, closer to GA in scope and complexity.
- Umami. Open-source and self-hosted, developer friendly.
Where YourTraffic fits
If you want the privacy of Plausible, the openness of Umami and an API that AI agents can actually query, YourTraffic covers all three. There are no per-site limits, so you can track one project or a hundred on the same account. The tracking script is under a kilobyte, so it will not drag your pages down.
Moving off Google Analytics takes an afternoon. Add your site, drop one script tag in the head and your first visits show up within seconds.