People leave GA4 for three different reasons — the consent banner, the learning curve, or the fact that it won't tell them which channel made money — and those reasons point at different replacements. Work out which one is yours before reading the list, because the right answer changes completely depending on it.
An open-source, EU-hosted, cookieless analytics tool — the product that made privacy-first web analytics mainstream.
Where it wins
The default recommendation for a reason: cookieless, open source, self-hostable, readable in ten seconds, and mature. If you don't have a specific requirement pulling you elsewhere, start here.
The tradeoff
Funnels, ecommerce revenue attribution, and the Stats API are gated behind the Business plan, which changes the price comparison at the point you need them.
Pricing model
Tiered by monthly pageviews and gated by feature: Starter $9/mo, Growth $14/mo, and Business $19/mo at the lowest tier, where funnels, ecommerce revenue attribution, and the Stats API start. Check current pricing
2. Fathom Analytics
Best for agencies and portfolio owners
A cookieless, GDPR-focused analytics service that has been shipping since 2018, with an unusually generous number of sites per plan.
Where it wins
At least 50 sites on a single plan and data kept forever, with conversions and revenue tracking on every tier rather than the top one.
The tradeoff
No subscription lifetime-value reporting, and pricing by pageview tier gets expensive for one very busy site.
Pricing model
Tiered by monthly pageviews with every feature on every plan — $45/mo at 500k pageviews, at least 50 sites included, and forever data retention. Check current pricing
3. Revtrail
That's usBest for SaaS and subscription businesses
Cookieless web and mobile analytics where the headline number is revenue: payments arrive from verified Stripe and RevenueCat webhooks and are credited to the channel that first brought the visitor.
Where it wins
Revenue is the headline number, not a configurable event: payments arrive from verified Stripe and RevenueCat webhooks and stay credited to the first-touch channel through every renewal, so channels rank by lifetime value.
The tradeoff
No free tier, no self-hosting, and no session replay or product analytics. If your site doesn't take payments, most of what you'd be paying for goes unused.
Pricing model
Starter $9/mo and Growth $49/mo by monthly event allowance, every feature on both plans, 14-day trial, no free tier. Check current pricing
4. Matomo
Best for teams that want everything in one platform
The long-running open-source GA replacement, with ecommerce, heatmaps, session recording, and a plugin marketplace.
Where it wins
The most feature-complete open-source option — ecommerce, heatmaps, session recording, tag manager, plugins — with a free self-hosted edition and unlimited hits.
The tradeoff
The breadth is configuration you have to do, and self-hosting means owning a PHP app, a database, and an archiving job that needs tuning at volume.
Pricing model
On-Premise Community is free and open source with unlimited hits; Matomo Cloud starts at €29/mo for 50k hits and €299/mo at 600k hits, with premium plugins sold as bundles. Check current pricing
5. Umami
Best for developers who'd rather host it themselves
An MIT-licensed analytics app you can run yourself on Postgres or MySQL, with a hosted cloud version if you'd rather not.
Where it wins
MIT-licensed, runs on a Postgres or MySQL instance you probably already have, and costs nothing but the server.
The tradeoff
You own uptime, upgrades, and query performance — and analytics queries are exactly the workload a row-store struggles with as your events table grows.
Pricing model
Free forever if you self-host — you pay for the server. The hosted cloud is a paid monthly plan by event volume. Check current pricing
6. Cloudflare Web Analytics
Best for sites that just need traffic counts
A free, privacy-first traffic panel Cloudflare includes with every account, focused on pageviews and Core Web Vitals.
Where it wins
Free on every Cloudflare plan including the free one, privacy-first, with Core Web Vitals included. If you're already behind Cloudflare it's a one-minute switch.
The tradeoff
Built around pageviews and Web Vitals rather than conversion goals, funnels, or revenue.
Best for teams whose real questions are about the product
An open-source product-analytics platform that also ships session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys, and error tracking.
Where it wins
A million events a month free, plus session replay, feature flags, experiments, and surveys in one platform.
The tradeoff
Cookie-based identity by default means you're likely still behind a consent banner — which for many people was the reason to leave GA4 in the first place.
Pricing model
Usage-based with no base fee: the first 1M product-analytics events each month are free, then roughly $0.00005/event descending with volume, with replay, flags, and surveys metered separately. Check current pricing
If you left because of the consent banner
Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch, and Revtrail are all designed to run without one. Check the details rather than the marketing: what matters is whether the tool stores anything on the device and whether it can link a visitor across sites. Note that a cookieless analytics tool doesn't remove a banner you need for ad pixels or session recording — if those stay, the banner stays.
If you left because of the learning curve
Almost anything on this list is simpler than GA4, and Simple Analytics and Cloudflare are the simplest. Be honest about whether you want a simpler tool or a simpler question: 'how much traffic did I get' has an easy answer everywhere, and 'which channel produced revenue' is a harder question that no dashboard makes trivial.
If you left because GA4 wouldn't tell you what made money
This narrows the list fast. Plausible on Business, Fathom, Pirsch on Plus, Matomo's ecommerce reporting, and Revtrail all report revenue in some form. The differences that matter: where the number comes from (a browser event or a verified payment webhook), and whether renewals stay credited to the original channel. For a store, transaction-level reporting is enough. For a subscription business, it isn't.
You probably don't have to choose today
All of these are a script tag. Run two for a fortnight, compare what they tell you, and keep the one that changed a decision. Expect visitor counts to differ between any two of them — different identity models, different bot filtering, different consent behaviour. Directional agreement is what you're checking for, not matching totals.
Questions people actually ask
Which Google Analytics alternative is free?
Cloudflare Web Analytics (free on every plan), Umami and Matomo if you self-host, and the free tiers of PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Simple Analytics. Revtrail has no free tier.
Can I import my GA4 history into any of these?
Effectively no. Historical import isn't offered by most of them, so plan to run the new tool alongside GA4 for as long as you need the overlap.
Do I still need a cookie banner after switching?
Not for the cookieless tools themselves. If you keep ad pixels, session recorders, or other cookie-setting tools, those obligations are unchanged.
Is GA4 actually bad?
No. It's free, extremely capable, and if your growth runs through Google Ads it's close to mandatory. The reasons to leave are specific: consent-driven data loss, the learning curve, and how much work revenue attribution takes.