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Revtrail vs Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics earned its name: one screen, no cookies, no consent banner, nothing to configure. That restraint is the product. Choosing between the two is really a question about how much you need the tool to know about money.
Revtrail vs Simple Analytics, feature by feature
| Capability | Revtrail | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie consent banner | Not required — daily rotating hashes, no cookies, no cross-site identifiers. | Not required — no cookies, no consent banners, no personal data. |
| Revenue attribution | The product. Payments join the visitor's first-touch journey and every channel is ranked by the money it produced. | Not the focus of the product; the dashboard is built around traffic, referrers, and events. |
| Dashboard surface | Traffic plus goals, funnels, retention, segments, and revenue views. | One deliberately minimal screen. |
| Data residency | Hosted on our infrastructure; events land in a columnar store. | EU-based company with EU hosting as a core selling point. |
| Ad-blocker recovery | Documented first-party proxy setup you run on your own origin. | Traffic recovery offered on the enterprise tier. |
| Free tier | None — 14-day trial, then $9/mo. | A free plan is available. |
Simple Analytics pricing: A free tier plus self-serve from $20/mo around 100k pageviews, scaling with traffic; enterprise adds ad-blocker traffic recovery and raw data export. Read off their own pricing page in August 2026 — check it before you decide, because plans move and we don't control that page.
Minimal is a feature until you need to make a spending decision
One screen is genuinely the right answer for a blog, a docs site, or a portfolio. It stops being the right answer the moment you're choosing between two ad channels or deciding whether a newsletter sponsorship paid for itself. Those questions need the visitor-to-payment join, and a minimal traffic dashboard can't produce it no matter how well designed it is.
Both avoid the banner, differently
Simple Analytics collects no personal data at all and leans on EU hosting as part of the pitch. Revtrail counts visitors with a daily rotating hash that can't be reversed into a person or linked across sites, then keeps the visitor-to-payment link server-side. Both approaches avoid the consent banner; ours retains enough continuity to attribute a payment that happens a week after the first visit.
Ad blockers hit both, and the fix is the same
Any third-party analytics domain gets blocked for some share of your audience. Simple Analytics sells traffic recovery on its enterprise tier. Revtrail documents a first-party proxy you set up yourself: rewrite a path on your own domain to our script and relay the beacon through your own origin, forwarding the headers we need for geography. It's about ten minutes of config on Vercel and it costs nothing extra.
So which one should you use?
Simple Analytics is the better fit if your site doesn't sell anything, if a free tier matters, or if EU data residency is a procurement requirement. Revtrail is the better fit if you need to know which channel produced revenue and are willing to look at a slightly busier dashboard to find out.
Questions people actually ask
- Does Revtrail have a free plan like Simple Analytics?
- No. There's a 14-day trial on either paid plan and no free tier. Starter is $9/mo.
- Is Revtrail hosted in the EU?
- Check our privacy page for current data-handling and hosting details before making a residency decision — if EU residency is a hard requirement, verify it rather than taking a comparison page's word for it.
- Can I get a one-screen view in Revtrail?
- The site overview is close: visitors, pageviews, revenue, top sources, and active visitors on one screen. Goals, funnels, and retention live behind separate tabs, so the front page stays readable.
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