Simple Analytics set the bar for cookieless, consent-free web analytics. If you're shopping for an alternative, here's an honest, side-by-side look at the hosted options — pricing, features, and EU data handling — plus a free-tier pick.
| Tool | Hosting | Cookieless | Free Tier | Pricing Shape |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple Analytics | EU (Netherlands) | Yes | Limited | Tiered by usage |
| GhostMetrics | Cloudflare edge (US default, EU on request) | Yes | Free forever, 1 site | Flat $9.99/mo unlimited |
| Plausible | EU (self-host option) | Yes | Trial | Tiered by pageviews |
| Fathom | Global / EU isolation option | Yes | Trial | Tiered by pageviews |
| Umami | Self-host or EU cloud | Yes | Yes (self-host free) | Free self-host / tiered cloud |
Pricing shapes are described generally. Competitor tiers change often — always confirm current numbers and free-tier limits on each provider's own pricing page before deciding.
Most people who search for a Simple Analytics alternative aren't unhappy — they're optimizing. Simple Analytics does its core job well, so the reasons to look elsewhere tend to be about fit rather than failure. Understanding your actual motivation up front saves you from switching to something that solves a problem you don't have.
The most common trigger is pricing shape. Simple Analytics uses tiered pricing that scales with how much data you send it. That's fair and predictable at low volume, but if you run several small sites, or one site whose traffic is spiky, a per-usage model can feel like it punishes success. Some teams would rather pay a single flat rate and never think about it again, or start on a genuine free tier while a side project finds its footing.
The second trigger is a free tier for real. Simple Analytics offers a limited free option, but people building a first blog, a portfolio, or an early-stage product often want something that stays free indefinitely for one site without a countdown clock. That's a legitimate reason to compare — just make sure the free plan you move to actually includes the views and features you'll use, not a stripped-down teaser.
The third is hosting and latency geography. Simple Analytics hosts in the EU, which is a feature for European teams and a mild latency consideration for globally distributed traffic. If most of your visitors are in North America or Asia, an edge-hosted tracker that answers from a nearby point of presence can shave milliseconds and reduce the chance the script is the slowest thing on the page.
Finally, some teams want specific features Simple Analytics keeps deliberately minimal — richer funnels, per-page Core Web Vitals, organization detection, or CSV export. Simple Analytics' minimalism is a philosophy, not an oversight, so wanting more depth is a valid reason to look at tools built around a fuller dashboard. If you fall into any of these buckets, keep reading. If none of them describe you, honestly, Simple Analytics is fine and switching is busywork.
Any fair comparison has to start by giving Simple Analytics its due, because a lot of what makes it good is exactly what you'll want to preserve in whatever you switch to. It's not a weak product you're escaping — it's a strong one you're weighing against alternatives.
Privacy by design. Simple Analytics is cookieless. It doesn't drop tracking cookies, doesn't build cross-site profiles, and doesn't collect the kind of personal data that forces you to show a consent banner. For most sites that means you can run it without the GDPR/ePrivacy cookie-consent popup that ruins the first impression of a page. The company is EU-based and publicly attests to GDPR compliance, which removes a whole category of legal anxiety for European businesses.
Genuine simplicity. The name is the product thesis. The dashboard shows you the handful of numbers most site owners actually check — visitors, pageviews, top pages, top referrers — without the sprawling, intimidating surface area of legacy analytics suites. There's real value in a tool your whole team can read at a glance without training. Minimalism reduces the temptation to over-measure and the risk of misreading noisy vanity metrics.
Lightweight and fast. The tracking script is small, so it doesn't drag down page performance the way heavyweight tags can. That matters for both user experience and your own Core Web Vitals scores.
EU data handling. Because data is processed and stored in the EU, Simple Analytics is an easy story to tell a European legal or procurement team. There's no transatlantic data-transfer conversation to have, no Standard Contractual Clauses to paper over. For organizations where that's a hard requirement, this alone can be decisive.
A clear ethical stance. Simple Analytics markets itself on not surveilling visitors, and the product backs that up. If you're switching, the goal should be to match or beat that posture — not to quietly trade privacy for features. The good news is that the best alternatives, including cookieless edge tools, are built on the same no-tracking foundation, so you don't have to compromise your principles to get more capability.
Pricing is where the alternatives genuinely diverge, and it's the single biggest reason people switch. If you're specifically after a Simple Analytics pricing alternative, the key insight is that these tools use fundamentally different shapes of pricing, and the right one depends less on the sticker number than on your traffic pattern and how many sites you run.
Usage-tiered (Simple Analytics, Plausible, Fathom). These charge based on volume — typically pageviews or events per month. You pick a tier that covers your traffic and move up as you grow. The upside is that you pay roughly in proportion to how much you use the tool, which feels fair. The downside is that a viral spike, a bot wave, or simply steady growth pushes you into the next bracket, and if you run multiple properties you may need to add sites or upgrade tiers. Always read whether "sites" and "pageviews" are pooled or capped per property, because that detail changes the real monthly cost more than the headline price does. I'm deliberately not quoting exact tier numbers here — they change, and the only trustworthy source is each vendor's live pricing page.
Flat-rate (GhostMetrics Pro). GhostMetrics takes the opposite approach: $9.99/mo flat, with unlimited websites and unlimited pageviews at that one price, plus a 30-day free trial (card to start, cancel anytime). There's no per-view metering and no per-site add-on, so your bill doesn't move when a post takes off or when you spin up a fourth microsite. For agencies, indie hackers with a portfolio of projects, or anyone whose traffic is unpredictable, a flat rate turns analytics into a fixed line item you never have to revisit.
Free-forever (GhostMetrics Free). GhostMetrics also has a $0 plan with no card required: one website, unlimited pageviews, the real-time dashboard, and every view — geo, sources, funnels, vitals — not a crippled subset. For a single blog or product site that's often all you need indefinitely. Simple Analytics offers its own limited free tier as well, so if free is your priority, compare the exact limits on each provider's pricing page side by side.
Self-host-free (Umami, Plausible CE). If you're willing to run infrastructure, Umami and the community edition of Plausible are open-source and free to self-host — you trade a monthly bill for the ongoing cost of maintaining a database and a server. That's the cheapest path in dollars and the most expensive in time.
Feature depth is the other axis where these tools split. Simple Analytics leans intentionally minimal; other options add layers. Here's how the capabilities actually stack up, so you can match depth to what you'll genuinely use rather than paying for dashboards you'll never open.
Core dashboards. Every tool here gives you the essentials — visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrers, and geography. Simple Analytics presents these cleanly and stops there on purpose. GhostMetrics ships 11 analytics tabs (Overview, Pages, Visitors, Geo, Sources, Performance, Engagement, a "Who's-Looking" organization-detection view, Events, Live, and Funnel), which is more surface area if you want it and easy to ignore if you don't.
Custom events. If you need to track button clicks, signups, downloads, or purchases, you'll want first-class event support. GhostMetrics supports custom events with UTM attribution, so you can tie a conversion back to the campaign that drove it. Simple Analytics supports events too, in keeping with its lighter approach. Confirm the event model and any per-tier event caps on whichever tool you pick.
Funnels and paths. This is where fuller tools pull ahead. GhostMetrics includes conversion funnels plus entry and exit path analysis, so you can see where visitors drop off in a multi-step flow. If funnels are central to how you measure a product, that depth matters; if you mostly watch top-line traffic, it's a nice-to-have.
Core Web Vitals. GhostMetrics measures Core Web Vitals — FCP, LCP, CLS, and TTFB — broken down by page and by device, alongside scroll depth and time-on-page. That turns your analytics tool into a lightweight performance monitor, which many privacy tools leave out entirely. It's a real differentiator if page speed is part of your SEO or UX work.
Script weight. The GhostMetrics tracker is under 3KB gzipped, versus 45KB+ for Google Analytics, and it's served from Cloudflare's edge. A tracker is public and auditable at /gm.js. Lighter scripts help your own Web Vitals, which is a nice irony for a tool that also measures them. As a fair caveat: the GhostMetrics dashboard itself is hosted and closed-source — only the tracker is public, the same model Fathom and Simple Analytics use.
Privacy is the whole reason this category exists, so it deserves precision rather than marketing gloss. The good news: every credible privacy analytics tool in this comparison is cookieless and consent-banner-free by design. The nuance is in where data lives and how visitor identity is handled, and that's where your requirements should drive the choice.
The residency question. If your organization has a hard requirement that analytics data never leave the EU, the honest answer is to pick an EU analytics alternative that's native to the region. Simple Analytics hosts in the Netherlands. Plausible is EU-hosted with a self-host option, and Umami can be self-hosted anywhere you like, including entirely within the EU. These are the safe defaults when residency is written into a contract or a compliance policy. This is the one area where an alternative can be a downgrade, so be clear-eyed about it.
Where GhostMetrics sits. GhostMetrics runs on US Cloudflare by default, with EU data residency available on request. We're transparent about that because it's the honest tradeoff: the default gives you a fast global edge, and EU residency is there if you ask for it. If strict EU residency is non-negotiable and you don't want to have that conversation, GhostMetrics itself will point you toward Plausible, Umami, or Simple Analytics rather than pretend to be something it isn't.
How GhostMetrics handles identity, concretely. There are no cookies and nothing written to localStorage — the tracker uses sessionStorage, wiped when the tab closes. A visitor's IP is used only in memory to derive a session hash and is then discarded; it's never written to the database. The hash is SHA-256(daily-rotating 32-byte salt | siteId | IP | User-Agent) truncated to 64 bits, scoped per site — so the same person on two different sites produces two unrelated hashes that can't act as a cross-site cookie. The salt rotates every UTC day and is deleted (48-hour KV TTL), so yesterday's hashes can't be reversed or correlated with today's. There's no fingerprinting: no canvas probing, no font enumeration, no persistent identifier. GhostMetrics also honors Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track — those visits are never recorded at all. Country, region, and city are derived at Cloudflare's edge and the IP is discarded on the spot, with city the finest location ever stored. For a broader landscape view, see our roundup of privacy-friendly analytics compared.
GhostMetrics isn't the only alternative worth your time, and a fair guide names the others honestly. Depending on your priorities — open source, EU-native, or fullest feature set — one of these may fit better than either Simple Analytics or GhostMetrics. Here's a neutral read on the main contenders.
Plausible. The best-known cookieless option after Simple Analytics. It's EU-hosted, open source, and offers a self-hosted community edition alongside its managed cloud. Pricing is usage-tiered by pageviews. Plausible is a strong pick if you value an open-source dashboard you can inspect or run yourself, and if EU hosting matters. Its feature set sits between Simple Analytics' minimalism and the fuller dashboards, with goals and simple funnels available.
Fathom Analytics. Another well-regarded privacy-first tool, cookieless and consent-free, with options for EU data isolation. Fathom is polished, stable, and has a loyal following among indie founders and agencies. It's usage-tiered by pageviews. If you want a mature, no-surprises hosted tool and don't need funnels or Web Vitals depth, it's an easy recommendation. We cover it in more detail in our Fathom Analytics alternatives guide.
Umami. The go-to for people who want to self-host and pay nothing. Umami is open source, cookieless, and lightweight, with a managed cloud tier if you'd rather not run it. Choosing Umami self-hosted means accepting the operational cost — a database, a host, and upgrades — in exchange for full control and EU residency wherever you deploy it. For technically comfortable teams, it's excellent value.
Others. There's a long tail — Pirsch, Counter, GoatCounter, and more — each cookieless and privacy-minded with its own emphasis. The category is healthy, which is good for you: competition keeps everyone honest on privacy and pricing. For a structured breakdown of the whole cookieless space, including how identity models and event tracking differ, see our cookieless analytics compared deep dive. The takeaway across all of them is the same: pick on residency, price shape, and feature depth, because on the core privacy promise they largely agree.
Here's the direct Simple Analytics vs GhostMetrics comparison distilled, since GhostMetrics is the tool we build and the one most people arrive here weighing against Simple Analytics. We'll keep it fair: these are close cousins that share a philosophy, and the differences are about shape, not values.
Both are hosted, cookieless, consent-free, and built so a normal site doesn't need a cookie banner for analytics. Neither builds cross-site visitor profiles. Both keep the tracker light and the dashboard readable. If you liked the privacy posture of Simple Analytics, GhostMetrics won't ask you to give any of it up.
Hosting: Simple Analytics is EU-hosted; GhostMetrics runs on Cloudflare's global edge with EU residency available on request. Pricing: Simple Analytics is usage-tiered; GhostMetrics is free forever for one site and a flat $9.99/mo for unlimited sites and pageviews. Depth: GhostMetrics adds 11 tabs, funnels, per-page Core Web Vitals, organization detection, custom events with UTM attribution, and CSV export plus public shareable dashboards on Pro. Residency default: Simple Analytics wins if strict EU residency is a hard line and you don't want to make a request.
The honest summary: if EU-native hosting by default is your top priority, Simple Analytics has the edge. If a free tier, flat pricing, edge speed, and a deeper dashboard matter more, GhostMetrics is the stronger fit. Both are defensible choices, and I'd rather you land on the right one than the one I'm paid to prefer. For exact tier numbers on the Simple Analytics side, check their current pricing page — I won't quote figures that might be stale by the time you read this.
Start free on one site See the live demo firstThe best analytics tool is the one that matches your situation, not the one with the longest feature list. Here's a straight recommendation by profile, so you can find yourself in the list and move on with your day.
You're a European team or handle EU-sensitive data and want EU-native hosting by default with zero configuration. You value radical simplicity and would rather see five numbers than fifty. You're already happy with it — in which case, again, switching is busywork.
You want to start genuinely free on one site with the full dashboard, or you run several sites and prefer a flat $9.99/mo over usage tiers that climb with traffic. You want more depth than minimalist tools offer — funnels, per-page Core Web Vitals, organization detection, custom events — without a heavy script or a consent banner. Global edge speed appeals to you, and US-default hosting with EU-on-request is acceptable for your compliance posture. If that's you, the fastest way to decide is to compare for yourself on the no-signup live demo, then start free on one site.
You want an open-source dashboard you can inspect or self-host, EU hosting, and a middle-ground feature set. It's the natural pick for teams that value transparency in the software itself, not just the data policy.
You want a mature, stable, hosted tool with EU isolation options and don't need funnels or Web Vitals. It's a safe, boring-in-the-best-way choice for founders who just want reliable numbers.
You're technical, want to pay nothing, and are happy to self-host for full control and residency wherever you deploy. It's the best dollar value in the category if your time is cheaper than your budget.
Compare, then start free →Don't take our word for it. GhostMetrics runs a public dashboard on our own live traffic — no signup, no email, no card. Poke around the funnels, geo, and Web Vitals, then start free on your first site.
Start free on one site Open the live demoDisclosure: GhostMetrics is built and operated by Null Agency, the publisher of this article, so we have a stake in it. We've done our best to keep the comparison fair — competitor pricing shapes are described in general terms because exact tiers change, and you should confirm current numbers and free-tier limits on each provider's own pricing page. Where another tool is the better fit, we say so.