Honest analytics roundups

Every roundup compares on stated criteria and names the trade-off, including when another tool is the better answer than ours.

These roundups compare analytics tools on stated criteria rather than ranking by preference: what each tool actually stores, what it costs at real volume, whether you can self-host it, and what it deliberately does not do. They are written by the team behind smolanalytics, an open-source (MIT) single Go binary that does web and product analytics plus computed agent observability, so each page says plainly where smolanalytics fits and where another tool is the better answer. Every roundup names the trade-off instead of hiding it: PostHog is deeper but heavier to run, Plausible is the most battle-tested privacy brand but web-analytics only, GA4 is free but samples data and monetizes through ads. Prices and capabilities are checked against the vendors' own pages, and where a tool is the better pick for a given need, the page says so.