Life after Google Analytics

GA4 has a way of turning a simple question into an afternoon. You want to know which posts people read last week. Forty minutes later you're halfway through building an exploration, and the number at the end has a little icon beside it warning you it's an estimate.

There are seven services below that answer that question in about four seconds. Where something couldn't be verified, it's been left out rather than guessed at.

Why people leave GA4

Start with the banner - it's the one that actually bites. GA4 sets cookies by default, and cookies that identify a returning visitor need consent in the EU and UK. Every person who declines is a person your analytics can't see, and getting that consent is its own project now, not a checkbox.

Google's current answer is Consent Mode: a signal wired into every tag, telling Google what each visitor agreed to. Get it right and Google fills the gap left by visitors who said no with modelled data - a statistical guess, not a real number. Get it wrong and you lose that modelling too, plus ad personalisation. "Just add GA4" hasn't been a five-minute job for a while.

The good news: Google Analytics itself is not illegal in Europe. The 2022 rulings people still quote were about US data transfers, since replaced by a new adequacy decision on 10 July 2023. What's still live is the consent problem above, not the service's legality.

And the interface. Google runs training courses for a product that reports how many people visited your website.

Cabin

Cabin generates no unique identifier for a visitor - not a cookie, not a fingerprint, not a server-side hash of IP and user agent. Several services on this page do compute a hash and just throw it away nightly, which is a reasonable design too. Cabin has nothing to discard, because nothing was derived in the first place.

A few things worth knowing that most of this list doesn't have. Every plan, including Free, comes with MCP access, so you can point Claude or ChatGPT at your own dashboard and just ask it questions. Paid plans add carbon reporting, an estimate of the CO2 your pages generate; Agency separates AI-agent traffic from real visitors, so a crawler binge doesn't quietly inflate your numbers. Free also covers ten sites forever, more generous than most free tiers here.

What Cabin doesn't have: funnels, session replay, heatmaps, A/B testing, or a GA importer. On your list? Skip ahead to Matomo.

Plausible

Plausible is the service most people mean when they say "privacy-first analytics". Funnels, saved segments, ecommerce revenue attribution and a Stats API, all cookieless, all held in Falkenstein, Germany. It's AGPLv3 and self-hostable.

Check the quota before you sign up: their docs count custom events and pageviews together, and outbound clicks, downloads and form submissions all count as custom events. If you've enabled those, the quota goes faster than the headline number suggests.

Fathom

Fathom looks expensive until you count your domains - 50 sites are included at entry, and nothing else here comes close on a per-site basis.

EU visitor data is processed in the EU automatically, no configuration needed, and personal data from EU visitors never touches US infrastructure. Non-EU traffic runs through AWS.

Matomo

Two things about Matomo get repeated wrongly everywhere. First: it sets first-party cookies by default - cookieless is something you configure, not the out-of-the-box behaviour. Second: Matomo Cloud bills in hits, not pageviews, and a hit includes downloads, site searches, bot traffic and AI-assistant requests too, so 50,000 hits is considerably less real traffic than it sounds.

Now the generous part. Matomo's feature depth isn't close to anything else here: heatmaps, session recording, A/B testing, cohorts, a GA importer, server logs with no JavaScript at all. On-Premise Community is GPLv3 and free forever. Want Google-Analytics-class capability without Google? I'd rather point you at Matomo now than have you discover in month three that Cabin has no funnels.

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics has quietly become one of the more interesting services here. It's stopped pitching itself purely as a GA4 replacement and started pitching itself as a layer you run alongside GA4 or Adobe, exporting into your own warehouse or Looker Studio. They've done the SOC 2 work too, which matters once procurement gets involved.

Pricing is per user rather than per site, which is the number to check if a whole marketing team needs logins. Data stays in the Netherlands, and there are no cookies.

Cloudflare Web Analytics

Cloudflare Web Analytics is free, with no cookies and no paid tier. If you already proxy traffic through Cloudflare, collection needs no JavaScript at all - nobody else here offers that.

The catch: unsampled data is kept for seven days, then aggregated down to roughly a tenth. Fine for a hobby project, not fine if you're reporting quarter-on-quarter growth to anyone.

Umami

Umami bills in events, and the arithmetic catches people out - one pageview is one event, and every saved property on it is also an event, so a pageview carrying five properties costs six.

The licence is why developers pick it. MIT is the most permissive here by a distance, so you can fork it and use it commercially with almost no obligation. Self-hosting is free.

Side by side

Prices are as each vendor lists them, so the currencies are theirs, not a conversion. The bar is script size, drawn to scale against the largest one here.

Cabin's script is the smallest, only a little ahead of Plausible - not a real advantage, the bars are almost the same length. The gap that matters is further along: Matomo runs over 20 times heavier, Google's gtag.js well over 100 times. Check it yourself rather than trust a blog post, since it moves: curl -s -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" <script-url> | wc -c.

Picking one

Start with the unit, not the price. Pageviews, hits and events are three different products wearing the same number, and it's the most common way people end up on the wrong plan - work out roughly what your site generates in the vendor's own unit, then compare.

After that it's three questions: depth, data location, site count. Funnels and session replay point at Matomo. "The EU and nowhere else" points at Plausible, Simple Analytics or Matomo Cloud. A lot of small sites points at Fathom or Cabin, since per-site pricing is where the money goes if you're managing sites for clients.

Whatever you pick, run it next to GA4 for a fortnight before you pull the old tag. The numbers won't match, and knowing by how much beforehand saves an awkward conversation later.

Cabin's free plan covers 10 sites and 10,000 pageviews a month, no card required. Start there.