Web analytics tools with a free plan

What puts a tool on this page

A tool is counted here when the vendor publishes a plan that costs nothing and does not end on a date. A trial is not a free plan, however long it runs, and a free plan that only exists while a badge stays on your site is counted with its condition written next to it.

Open-source tools you run yourself are a separate case. Their code is free and their bill is a server: a small instance, a database, backups and the updates you apply. They appear here only when the vendor also sells a hosted service with a free step; otherwise look at the open source and self-hosted list, where the comparison is about what you take on rather than what you pay.

The free plans are not one thing

Three different businesses produce a free counter, and the free plan behaves differently in each.

Free because the data is the product. The largest free tiers belong to tools whose parent company earns elsewhere — advertising, or a paid suite the free product feeds. There is no traffic ceiling worth planning around, and the trade is written in the terms: what the vendor may do with what it collects, and where that data sits.

Free as the first step of a paid ladder. Most entries here work this way. The plan has a monthly allowance, a shorter history than the paid steps and a cap on sites or team members. The allowances in this table run from a few hundred events a month to several million, a range of four orders of magnitude, so the word Free tells you nothing until you read the number beside it.

Free for a defined audience. A few plans are open only to education domains, to pages hosted on GitHub or GitLab, or to sites that display the vendor’s widget or badge. Nothing is wrong with the trade, but it is a trade, and it belongs in the decision rather than in the footnotes.

Free, when what you are leaving is Google Analytics

A large part of the search for a free counter starts from one place: Google Analytics is already installed, it costs nothing, and the reason to move is something else — the consent banner, the weight of the script, where the data is stored, or simply that the report you want takes four clicks to reach.

Two things are worth knowing before that move. Google Analytics is free in the first sense above, not the second: nothing runs out because the product is paid for elsewhere, and what you accept in return is written in its terms. And a free plan on a smaller tool is usually narrower on purpose — fewer reports, shorter history, one site — so the honest comparison is not “free against free” but “what I actually read each week against what this plan keeps”.

If that is your case, start from the four rows below, then check whether the tool reads your existing history: several here import from Google Analytics 4, which decides whether your charts start empty. The Google Analytics alternatives page compares the wider field, paid plans included.

What runs out first

It is rarely the traffic limit. Read these four rows before the price:

1. History. A free plan often keeps months where a paid one keeps years. If you want to compare this December with last December, that row decides it, not the monthly allowance.
2. What counts toward the allowance. Some vendors count pageviews, some count events, and an event can be a click, a download or a form submission you switched on without thinking of it as billable. The billing unit is in the table; the methodology explains how the columns were filled.
3. Number of sites. Several free plans cover exactly one. An agency or a person with a handful of small projects hits that wall on day one.
4. What happens above the line. Collection stopping, the dashboard locking and an extra charge are three different answers, and the free plan is where you meet them first.

How to choose

1. Take your own monthly pageviews, add the actions you want tagged, and compare that single number against each allowance — not against the plan name.
2. Decide how much history you need, then drop every plan that keeps less.
3. Check the conditions attached to the word Free: a badge, a domain family, one site, a team of one.
4. Look at where the data is stored and whether cookies are set, because a free counter that needs a consent banner costs you something else. The cookieless list and the EU-data list narrow that.
5. Work out what the move to paid costs before you install, in the same unit. The card for each tool shows the first paid step and the price at a hundred thousand.

Questions and answers

Is a free plan enough for a small site?

Usually yes for the questions most sites ask: how many people came, from where, which pages, which campaign, what they clicked. What free plans take away first is history and the ability to add a second site. If a year-on-year chart matters to you, check the retention row before anything else.

Why is a self-hosted tool not automatically on this page?

Because the price is not zero, it is moved. You pay for a server, a database and the time to keep them running, and in exchange you get data nobody else holds. That is a different decision from picking a free hosted plan, so it has its own list.

Do free plans mean the vendor sells my data?

Not by default, and the answer is written in each vendor’s terms rather than in its pricing table. What a free plan always means is that somebody else is paying for it — an ad business, paid customers up the ladder, or a badge on your site. Read which one it is, and check where the data is stored while you are there.