WordPress analytics plugins, compared

Entry price is the lowest monthly price the vendor lists; “Free” means a free plan or free self-hosting. “At 100k” is the monthly price for 100,000 units, as the vendor bills them. Dates under statuses, prices and script sizes show when we checked them. See how we check every value.

What counts as a WordPress plugin here

A tool is on this page when the vendor publishes a WordPress plugin of its own, in the WordPress plugin directory or as a download from its site. The plugin has to come from the people who run the analytics service, because that settles who fixes it when the tracking code changes.

Five other tools can be added to WordPress with a plugin somebody else wrote: Ackee, Cabin, GoatCounter, Overtracking and Umami. Their cards mark the WordPress plugin row “Partly” and they are not counted here. A plugin from another developer can lag behind the vendor’s script, it can be abandoned without the vendor knowing, and support questions go to two places.

How many sites run a plugin and when it was last updated are not in our data; both sit on the plugin’s own page. A plugin untouched for two years is a different proposition from one released last month.

A vendor plugin or a Google Analytics connector

A search for a WordPress analytics plugin returns two kinds, and the table above holds one of them. A connector puts a Google Analytics tag on your pages and links the site to a Google Analytics property: the data goes to Google, the reports live there, and the plugin places the tag and sometimes mirrors a few charts in the admin. Site Kit is Google’s own version of that, showing figures from Search Console, Analytics, AdSense and PageSpeed Insights in the WordPress dashboard. A vendor plugin instead sends data to the vendor’s service, and many such plugins draw the main figures inside the admin.

The rest follows. With a connector, your questions about cookies, storage location, retention and price are questions about Google Analytics 4, a row in the full table like any other; with a vendor plugin, they are about that vendor.

What a plugin gives you that a snippet does not

A plugin puts the tracking code on every page without you opening a theme file, and keeps doing so after you switch themes. Most add settings a pasted snippet cannot offer: the Plausible plugin switches tracking off for chosen user roles and can proxy tracking requests through your own domain, and Koko Analytics excludes visits by user role or IP address.

Two of them go further and run the analytics on your site. Matomo publishes a plugin that runs Matomo inside WordPress, which is why its plugin page lists PHP and MySQL versions, a memory floor and a warning about server resources. Koko Analytics keeps its statistics in the WordPress database and needs no account anywhere.

The costs are ordinary. A plugin is code on your server to update, its settings live in your database rather than with the vendor, and it can break during an upgrade while the rest of the site keeps working, so the numbers stop without an obvious sign.

How to choose

Start with what is hard to reverse, then compare the rest.

  1. Decide whose analytics you want. A connector means Google Analytics 4 with a WordPress-shaped installer; a vendor plugin means that vendor’s service, storage location and prices.
  2. Apply what you cannot change. The Data in EU and Cookieless columns narrow the table first; nine of the tools here count visits without cookies, and the cookieless page explains that column.
  3. Read the plugin’s page: publisher, last update, the WordPress and PHP versions it expects. A plugin that runs the analytics itself brings server requirements too.
  4. Look at what it adds beyond inserting a script: role exclusions, a proxy through your domain, reports in the admin, imports.
  5. Compare the price at your traffic, in the unit each vendor bills; the methodology covers those columns.

Questions and answers

Do I need a plugin at all?

Not always. Most vendors here also give you a snippet for the theme header, a block in the site editor or a code-manager plugin, which is one plugin fewer to maintain. A plugin earns its place when it does something a snippet cannot: excluding user roles, proxying requests, showing reports in the admin. Koko Analytics is the exception, since there the plugin is the tool.

What about Site Kit and Google Analytics?

Site Kit is Google’s own plugin. It shows numbers from Search Console, Analytics, AdSense and PageSpeed Insights in the WordPress dashboard, while the data is collected and stored by those services. Choosing it is a decision about Google Analytics 4 rather than about the plugin: the cookies, the storage location and the retention rules are the ones in its row.

Will an analytics plugin slow my site down?

Two questions hide in that one. For visitors, what counts is the tracking script the browser loads, measured in the Script, gzip column on the date shown. For your server, a plugin that records and reports statistics itself adds database work, which is why the Matomo plugin page names memory and database requirements.

Does this work on WordPress.com?

Only on a paid plan. The WordPress.com documentation states that installing plugins is available on its paid plans, listing Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce, and that free sites have to upgrade first. Jetpack Stats is included on every plan, and connecting Google Analytics is documented as a Premium feature. A WordPress site you host yourself has no such limit.

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