Best privacy-friendly analytics. A cookieless, honest roundup.

• ·Want privacy plus product analytics from one snippet? smolanalytics: cookieless and first-party, with funnels, a verdict, and answers computed not guessed.
• ·Want polished cookieless web analytics you can self-host? Plausible: clean dashboard, tiny script, AGPL.
• ·Want a simple hosted product, no server to run? Fathom or Simple Analytics: strong privacy stance, set and forget.
• ·Want a lean, free, open-source self-host? Umami, or GoatCounter at its most minimal.

Ranked for the specific reader this page serves: someone who wants private, cookieless analytics they can trust and, ideally, own. If your priority is a different job (say, the absolute simplest hosted counter), the order would shift, and the tradeoffs below say exactly when it should.

1. 1smolanalyticscookieless · first-party · web + productfree for 14 days · then from $19/mo

   Best for: Best if you want privacy and product analytics from one snippet. Cookieless with no consent banner, first-party, geo derived at ingest with the IP never stored. Does web analytics (visitors, referrers, UTM) and product analytics (funnels, retention, paths, cohorts), plus an investigator's daily verdict on what to fix (it finds what changed and names who it hit) and a plain-English ask surface where answers are computed, not guessed.

   Tradeoff: It is commercial and managed, not open source; portability comes from one isolated instance per project and a one-file data export any time. It ships feature flags, A/B experiments, heatmaps, surveys, and an event-based session inspector, but not pixel-perfect DOM session replay (the video-style recording). If pure, ultra-minimal web analytics is all you want, Fathom or GoatCounter are simpler. It is a young, one-person project.

   see the features →
2. 2Plausiblepolished cookieless web analyticscloud from ~$9/mo · self-host free (AGPL)

   Best for: Best polished, open-source, privacy-first web analytics. Cookieless by default, no consent banner, a clean single-page dashboard, EU-hosted cloud, and a script that is a fraction of a kilobyte. Easy to self-host with its Docker setup.

   Tradeoff: Web analytics only: not built for product events, funnels, retention, or cohorts. Self-hosting runs on Elixir with ClickHouse and Postgres behind it.

   compare: Plausible →project site →
3. 3Fathom Analyticssimple cookieless, hostedcloud from ~$15/mo · no self-host

   Best for: Best simple, hosted cookieless web analytics with a strong privacy stance. No cookies, no consent banner needed, EU isolation options, and a famously fast, uncluttered dashboard. Set-and-forget for a marketing site.

   Tradeoff: It is a paid hosted product, not open-source and not self-hostable. Web analytics only: no product funnels, retention, or cohorts.

   project site →
4. 4Umamilean self-hosted, open-sourceself-host free (MIT) · cloud tier available

   Best for: Best lean self-hosted, open-source web analytics. Privacy-friendly, cookieless, a tidy dashboard, and a very small footprint. A popular free swap for Google Analytics on a marketing site, with a hosted cloud if you prefer.

   Tradeoff: Web-first: event tracking is basic, and there are no real product funnels, retention, or cohorts. Self-hosting needs a Postgres or MySQL database alongside it.

   compare: Umami →project site →
5. 5Simple Analyticsno-personal-data, hostedcloud from ~$9/mo · no self-host

   Best for: Best for a hard no-personal-data promise on a hosted cloud. Cookieless, no consent banner, EU-based, and marketed on collecting no personal data at all. A clean, privacy-forward dashboard.

   Tradeoff: A paid hosted product, not open-source or self-hostable. Web analytics only, with events but no product funnels, retention, or cohorts.

   project site →
6. 6GoatCounterminimal, free, open-sourcefree (open-source) · free hosted tier

   Best for: Best truly minimal, free, open-source web analytics. Cookieless, no personal data, a tiny footprint, and a free hosted tier for non-commercial and small sites. Self-hosts as a single Go binary too.

   Tradeoff: Deliberately spartan: basic reports only, no product analytics, and the free hosted tier is aimed at small or non-commercial sites. It is a small, community project.

   project site →

Self-host footprints are the typical documented stacks; each project's cloud hides all of it for you. Cloud prices are entry tiers that scale with traffic, so check the current pricing pages before you commit.

smolanalytics is commercial software with nothing for you to run. It is cookieless with no consent banner, first-party, and geo is derived at ingest with the IP never stored, so it keeps every privacy property the tools above are chosen for; each project runs on its own isolated instance and your data exports in one file any time. From one snippet you get web analytics (visitors, referrers, UTM) and product analytics (funnels, retention, paths, cohorts), plus a verdict that tells you what to fix on the dashboard and in a morning brief.

The wedge is the ask surface. You ask in plain English from a dashboard bar, or from your own Cursor or Claude over MCP (97 tools, 15 prompts), and the answer is computed from the same deterministic reports the dashboard renders, never generated by an LLM. You bring your own AI model, so the AI part is free. Importers from PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Umami, CSV, and JSONL mean switching is a copy, not a rebuild.

The honest limit: it ships feature flags, A/B experiments, heatmaps, surveys, and an event-based session inspector, but not pixel-perfect DOM session replay, the video-style recording of a real DOM; and if all you want is the absolute simplest hosted counter, Fathom or GoatCounter are simpler. It is also a young project built by one person. Pick smolanalytics when what you want is private analytics you own that can also answer product questions, straight and cheaply.

npx smolanalytics init