Matomo is the big one: open-source, self-hostable, and a good deal broader than Cabin, with heatmaps, session recordings and A/B testing sitting on top of the analytics. That breadth gets paid for somewhere, though, and it gets paid for in what you host, what you ship to every visitor, and what you have to configure before the numbers are actually private.
That last one catches people out. Matomo sets a first-party cookie by default, so cookieless is a setting you have to go and find, and Matomo Cloud bills in hits rather than pageviews, which is a different and much larger number.
Cabin is the other end of the trade. One screen, one line of HTML, nothing to host, and nothing stored about your visitors. Most sites want fast, private numbers rather than a suite, and that's the bit Cabin is for.
Matomo's tracker is a whole analytics suite delivered to every visitor, on every page. Cabin sends 1.2 KB, and gzipped is the number that matters: those are the bytes that actually travel down the wire. Where Matomo is something you host, upgrade and keep running, Cabin is one line of HTML that's live in about 30 seconds.
Measured gzipped on 18 August 2026: Cabin 1,212 bytes, matomo.js 28,142. That's cdn.matomo.cloud rather than a self-hosted instance, and a plugin-heavy install can be heavier. Uncompressed it's 83,875 bytes, which is the figure most comparisons quote, including an earlier version of this page. Check it yourself with curl -s -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" <url> | wc -c.
No cookies and nothing stored on the visitor's device, so no consent banner under GDPR, ePrivacy or PECR.
Sets a first-party cookie by default, so most installs need a banner. Cookieless is a setting you turn on, not the starting point.
Nothing. Visits increment anonymous daily counters, so two views are never linked.
With cookies off it falls back to a config_id, a server-side hash of IP, user agent and device details, used to recognise a returning visit.
Pageviews, with known bots filtered out before they reach your total.
Hits. A pageview is a hit, but so is every event, download, outlink and site search, so 50,000 hits goes a lot faster than it sounds.
Hosted for you. One line of HTML and you're live in about 30 seconds, with nothing to update, secure or scale.
Run your own server, database, upgrades and backups, or pay for Matomo Cloud and let them do it.
Deliberately one screen: visitors, sources, pages, countries, carbon. No heatmaps, no session recording, no A/B testing, no GA import.
Broader: heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, cohorts, a GA importer and log-file tracking with no JavaScript.
An MCP server on every plan, including Free. Your agent reads reports, adds domains and verifies installs without any glue code.
A Reporting API you can build against, but nothing an agent can pick up on its own.
Per-page CO₂ and energy, shown as grams and km driven. Built in on Plus and up.
No carbon or energy reporting.
Stored in Ireland with a backup in London. A few collection endpoints sit outside the EU to receive requests quickly, writing nothing to disk.
Matomo Cloud is in Frankfurt. Self-hosted, it lives wherever you put it, which is the strongest version of data ownership on offer.
Free for 10 sites and 10,000 pageviews a month. Plus is $14 a month for a million pageviews and unlimited sites.
Free forever if you self-host the Community edition. Matomo Cloud starts at €29 a month for 50,000 hits across 30 sites.
Matomo's prices, limits and cookie behaviour checked against their own pages on 16 August 2026, and the script re-measured on 18 August. They move, so check before you rely on them.
An MCP server on every plan, including Free, so the agent you already use can read reports, add domains and verify your install mid-conversation. Matomo has a Reporting API, which is a different thing: you have to build against it first.
See MCP accessWith Matomo you own the server, the database, the upgrades and the backups, or you pay Cloud to own them for you. Cabin is hosted: add one line of HTML and it's live in seconds, with no maintenance window and nothing to scale.
See the plansCabin estimates the CO₂ of every page it measures and shows it as grams and km driven, which is usually enough to find the two or three heavy pages doing most of the damage.
Check your site's carbonThese two barely overlap, which makes the choice easier than most. Matomo is a suite you run. Cabin is a number you glance at. If you're not sure which you want, the free plan will tell you inside a fortnight.