Google Analytics alternatives in 2026: prices, cookies and AI agents

The best Google Analytics alternative for most small sites is a cookieless tool that shows simple traffic numbers without a consent banner: Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Simple Analytics, Matomo or Measure. They differ on price, hosting, open source, and one thing almost no list covers: whether they show you the AI agents and crawlers reading your site.

Below is what each vendor says on its own site, with prices checked on 2026-10-28.

What is GA4, and why do people look for an alternative?

Google Analytics 4 is Google’s analytics product. Its JavaScript tags use first-party cookies. Google’s cookie usage page lists _ga, “used to distinguish users”, and _ga_<container-id>, “used to persist session state”, each with a two-year expiration.

Cookies bring consent. Google’s EU user consent policy requires you to get consent from users in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland for cookies or other local storage where the law requires it. Google’s consent mode docs put it plainly: “You are responsible for obtaining users’ consent.” When a visitor declines analytics storage, the tags stop reading and writing analytics cookies.

Bots are the other gap. GA4 excludes known bots automatically, and its bot-traffic page says “you cannot disable known bot traffic exclusion or see how much known bot traffic was excluded.” So GA4 tells you nothing about the crawlers and AI agents fetching your pages.

People switch for some mix of three reasons: drop the banner, get a simpler dashboard, or see traffic GA4 hides.

How do the alternatives compare?

Table: Google Analytics alternatives, from each vendor’s own pages (checked 2026-10-28)

Tool	Entry price (as listed)	Cookies	Open source	Bots and AI agents
Plausible	Starter $9/month, up to 10k monthly pageviews, 1 site	No	Yes	Filters bots out; shows which AI tools send you visitors
Fathom	$15/month, up to 100,000 monthly pageviews, 50 sites	No	Not stated	“Automatic bot filtering”
Umami	Hobby $0, 100K events/month, 1 site; Pro $20/month, 1M events	No	Yes, self-host free	Not mentioned on pricing or home page
Matomo	Cloud €22/month (US$26) excl. tax, 50,000 hits; On-Premise free	Yes by default, can be turned off	Yes	AI Assistants report tags AI agent visits
Simple Analytics	Free plan (30 days history); paid $20/month, 100k pageviews, 5 sites	No	Not stated	Not mentioned on pricing page
Measure	$29/month for 40 sites, then $0.50 per site	No	Not stated	Counts humans, AI agents and bots apart; names operator and purpose

All prices are monthly billing. Plausible, Fathom, Matomo and Simple Analytics give two months free on annual billing. Matomo lists euros and dollars; the rest are US dollars.

Plausible

Plausible is open source, cookieless, and “made and hosted in the EU”. Starter is $9 a month for up to 10k monthly pageviews and one site. Growth is $14 for up to 3 sites, Business $19 for up to 10 sites, both at the 10k tier. The trial is 30 days, no credit card.

On bots, Plausible’s filtering docs describe blocking known bots and crawlers by user agent, filtering about 40,800 data center IP ranges, and pattern detection. Filtered traffic doesn’t show in your stats. Its home page also lists “Monitor traffic from AI tools”: which tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude send you visitors. That is referral traffic, people clicking through, not the agents fetching your pages.

Suits: anyone who wants a clean, EU-hosted dashboard of human traffic.

Fathom

Fathom starts at $15 a month for up to 100,000 monthly pageviews, and every plan includes at least 50 sites. Extra sites come in packs of 50 for $10 a month. The trial is 7 days, card required. Fathom says “Fathom doesn’t use cookies”, routes EU traffic through European-owned infrastructure, and includes “Automatic bot filtering” on every plan.

Suits: agencies and people with many sites and moderate traffic.

Umami

Umami is open source; you can self-host it for free or use Umami Cloud. The cloud Hobby plan is $0 for 100K events a month, one website and 6 months of retention. Pro is $20 a month for 1 million events, up to 20 websites and 2 years of retention, with a 14-day trial. Pro also lists API and MCP access. Umami says it “does not use cookies”. Its pricing and home pages don’t mention bots or AI agents.

Suits: developers happy to run their own server, or anyone who wants a capable free tier.

Matomo

Matomo is open source, and Matomo On-Premise is free. Matomo Cloud starts at €22 a month (US$26), excluding tax, for 50,000 hits, with a free trial and no credit card. Depending on plan it adds funnels, heatmaps, session recordings and A/B testing.

Matomo uses cookies by default. Its cookie FAQ shows how to turn them off with one line, _paq.push(['disableCookies']);.

Matomo is the one other tool here that reports AI agent visits. Its AI Assistants report says “Matomo detects AI-driven requests and tags them as AI agents to isolate this traffic from human visits”, covering tools such as ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot.

Suits: teams moving off GA4 who still want GA-level depth and full data ownership.

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics has a free plan for hobby sites: 5 websites, one month of history and a required badge. The paid plan is $20 a month at 100k pageviews, for 5 websites, billed monthly. The trial is 14 days, no credit card. It says “We do not use cookies”, and keeps data on infrastructure in the Netherlands unless you opt in to a feature like its AI assistant. Its pricing page doesn’t mention bots.

Suits: EU teams that want a simple dashboard and a free starting point.

Measure

Measure is cookieless: “No cookies, no consent banners”. It stores nothing on visitors’ devices and keeps no IP addresses. It is $29 a month for up to 40 sites, then $0.50 per extra site, with a 14-day trial (pricing). You add a card before the trial ends.

What it does differently: it counts humans, AI agents and bots separately, and names each agent with its operator and purpose (assistant, training or search). That means you can tell ChatGPT-User, fetching a page because someone asked ChatGPT a question, apart from GPTBot, OpenAI’s training crawler. Measure also ships an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or another MCP client can read your numbers.

Suits: sites that want to know how much of their traffic is AI, and people who’d rather ask an assistant than open a dashboard.

Which ones show the AI agents and crawlers visiting your site?

Of the tools above, only two say they report AI agent visits on their own pages: Matomo, through its AI Assistants report, and Measure. Plausible, Fathom and GA4 say they filter bots out. Plausible separately shows AI tools as referrers. Umami’s and Simple Analytics’ pricing pages don’t mention bots.

Filtering is right if you only care about people. But assistants now fetch pages for real users, and training crawlers take your content for models. Filtering hides both.

There is a catch for any script-based tool: most AI crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so a JS snippet misses them. Measure handles this with server-side capture. Your server sends POST /api/collect with a site_id, the path and the crawler’s user agent or an agent name, and Measure classifies it the same way as a browser hit. For more on the agents themselves, see Ask your AI agent about your traffic.

When is another tool the better pick?

• Plausible if you want the simplest EU-hosted dashboard of human visits and one small site. At 10k pageviews it is the cheapest paid plan here.
• Matomo if you need GA-level depth (funnels, heatmaps, recordings) or want to self-host everything for free. It also reports AI agent visits.
• Umami if you want open source you can run yourself, or a free cloud tier.
• Fathom if you run dozens of sites with combined traffic under 100,000 pageviews.
• Simple Analytics if you want a free plan and EU hosting.

Pick Measure when the AI share of your traffic matters to you, or when you want an assistant to read your stats over MCP. For head-to-head detail, see Measure vs Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Matomo and Simple Analytics.

FAQ

Is there a Google Analytics alternative that doesn’t need a cookie banner?

Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Simple Analytics and Measure all say they don’t use cookies. Matomo can run without cookies if you turn them off. Whether you need a banner also depends on your own site and the law where you operate, so check with your adviser. More on how this works in cookieless analytics.

Can GA4 show bot or AI crawler traffic?

No. Google says you can’t disable known bot exclusion or see how much bot traffic was excluded.

Which web analytics tools are free?

Matomo On-Premise and self-hosted Umami are free to run on your own server. Umami Cloud Hobby and Simple Analytics’ free plan are free hosted tiers with limits.

Are these prices current?

They were checked on each vendor’s pricing page on 2026-10-28. Vendors change prices, so confirm before you buy.