Web analytics tools with funnels

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 puts a tool on this page

A tool is counted here when it builds funnel reports itself: you name a sequence of steps — pages, events or both — and the tool shows how many people reached each one and where the rest stopped. The report has to be part of the product, not an export you finish in a spreadsheet.

Five more tools read “Partly” in that row and stay out of the list. In each case funnels exist but are fenced: they open on a higher tier, or they are sold as a separate paid add-on. Plausible is the clearest example — goals and custom events are on its entry plan, while funnels and user journeys belong to Business. Read the fence before the feature: a funnel on the fourth tier is a different purchase from a funnel on the first.

Two different things are called a funnel

In product analytics a funnel is built around a person. The tool identifies users, follows them across sessions and devices, and answers questions about cohorts: who came back, what the retained ones did differently, how a change moved the numbers for one group. That model needs an identity — a login, an identifier you send yourself — and it usually comes with the pricing and the complexity of that world.

In a website counter a funnel is built around a path. The steps are page addresses and events from the same visit, the numbers are counts rather than people, and nothing is asked of you beyond tagging the actions you care about. No identity, no cohorts, and for most site owners — a landing page, a signup form, a checkout — this is the report they actually wanted.

The table above mixes both kinds, because the question “does it do funnels” has one answer and the category column tells you which world the tool lives in. Sort by it before you compare prices: a hundred dollars a month is expensive for a path funnel and cheap for a cohort one.

Four questions to ask before you trust the chart

  1. What is a step? A page address, an event, or either. Tools that only accept page addresses cannot measure a checkout that never changes the URL, which is most single-page applications.
  2. What is the window? One session, twenty-four hours, seven days, thirty. The same funnel can lose half its conversions or double them depending on that setting, and the default differs from vendor to vendor.
  3. Strict order or any order? Whether a visitor who reached the last step without the middle one is counted, and whether extra steps in between break the sequence.
  4. Retroactive or forward-only? Whether the funnel can be built over data already collected, or only starts counting from the day you create it. This is the one that catches people out: you find a drop-off, build a funnel to study it, and have to wait a week for numbers.

How to choose

  1. Write the sequence down first, in plain words, with the exact pages and actions. That sentence decides whether you need path funnels or cohort funnels.
  2. Pick the world from the category column, then compare inside it.
  3. Check the four questions above against the vendor’s documentation, not its landing page.
  4. Look at what each step costs you in the billing unit: several tools here count custom events toward the plan, so a funnel with four tagged steps is four times the events on every visit.
  5. Only then compare price, storage location and script weight. The methodology explains how those columns were filled.

Questions and answers

Do I need funnels or are goals enough?

A goal counts how often something happened. A funnel shows where the people who did not get there stopped. If you already know your signup rate is four per cent and want to know which of the three steps loses them, that is a funnel; if you only need the four per cent on a chart, a goal is less work and available on more plans.

Can a cookieless tool build funnels at all?

Yes, within one visit. Without a lasting identifier the tool cannot follow someone who starts today and finishes on Friday, so a funnel across days needs either a longer-lived identifier or a login you provide. For a checkout or a signup completed in one sitting — the usual case — a cookie-free tool answers the question fully. The cookieless list shows which tools those are.

Why do my funnel numbers disagree with Google Analytics?

Because the definitions differ before the data does: a different window, a different rule about order, a different idea of what a session is, and on Google’s side modelling applied to thresholded data. Two tools on one site will not match, and chasing the difference is usually wasted work. Pick one as the number you act on and read the trend inside it. The guide to server-side and client-side tracking covers the other half of that gap.

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