Why there is no overall score
A single score hides the trade-off you actually have to make. A personal blog and an agency that runs dozens of client sites need different things from the same tool.
What a single score hides
An overall score is a weighted average. Someone has to decide how much script size counts against price, or cookies against features, and those weights produce the ranking. They reflect one set of priorities, which may not match yours.
An average also hides deal-breakers. A tool can score well overall and still fail the one requirement you cannot change, such as where the data is stored. A score also does not show how old its inputs are: prices and features change, and a single number gives no sign of which parts are out of date.
Different sites need different things
- A blog or content site often needs clear reports on pages and traffic sources, a light script and a low price at its traffic level. Funnels or an API may never come up.
- An agency with many client sites asks other questions: how a plan counts sites, whether traffic from all sites is added up for billing, whether each client can get its own dashboard access, and where each client’s data has to be stored.
- A product team looks at custom events, funnels and access through an API. It may send several events per visit, so the price per event can matter more to it than the entry price.
The same tool can suit one of them and not the others. One number cannot express that.
What we show instead
The table shows values you can check against the vendor: the size of the tracking script, the monthly price at 100,000 units in the unit the vendor bills, where the data is stored, whether the tool is cookieless by default, whether its code is open source, whether you can host it yourself and whether the vendor still operates. Status, prices and script sizes show the date of their last check. The methodology describes how each one is collected.
How to use the table
- Start with the requirement you cannot change and open the matching criterion page, such as cookieless web analytics tools or open-source web analytics you can self-host.
- Sort by the column that matters next: click a heading to sort, and click it again to reverse the order.
- Compare prices only between tools that bill in the same unit, or first estimate your traffic in each vendor’s unit.
- Open a tool’s card for its features and the dates of its checks, then confirm the details that matter to you on the vendor’s site.
The full table lists every tool in the directory.