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20 popular Google Analytics alternatives to grow your website
Whether you’re still mourning the end of Universal Analytics, don’t love the GA4 experience, or need a more privacy-friendly tool, the good news is there are plenty of free and affordable Google Analytics (GA) alternatives to replace and complement its functionality.
Last updated
27 Jan 2023
In this guide, we take you through some of the most popular GA alternatives that offer overlapping or complementary features so you can curate the right analytics tech stack to track, optimize, and grow your website.
The 8 best Google Analytics alternatives
1. Hotjar
What it is: Hotjar (that’s us 👋, welcome!) is a user-friendly behavior analytics platform that makes it easy to:
Visualize where people click, tap, and scroll with heatmaps
Watch real user browsing sessions across different pages with session recordings
Hear what customers love (and hate) by collecting in-the-moment website feedback, running async email and on-site surveys, and live user interviews
What it costs: Hotjar has a free plan for up to 35 daily sessions. All paid plans have a free trial and start at $32/month for Hotjar Observe (Heatmaps + Recordings), $48/month for Hotjar Ask (Surveys + Feedback), and $90/month or PAYG for Hotjar Engage (user interviews).
How Hotjar compares to Google Analytics: because, like GA4, it tracks website visitors using a single JavaScript snippet, Hotjar can display some of the same data like bounce rate, top viewed pages, and visitor country in the Dashboard.
But where Hotjar really adds value is by generating a simple, free way to visualize website behavior and collect customer feedback, with advanced insight filters, custom user attributes, and a large integration library for premium users.
Hotjar is also a privacy-first platform: sensitive customer data (like credit card numbers) is not collected or stored, you can block IP address collection, and we are compliant with GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations.
💡Pro tip: you don’t need to choose between Hotjar and GA. By integrating Hotjar with Google Analytics using our GA integration or combining it with any of the alternatives in this list, you’ll not only know what’s happening on your website (e.g. product pages have a high bounce rate), but also learn why it’s happening (e.g. heatmaps show users aren’t scrolling to your call-to-action or CTA).
2. Fathom Analytics
What it is: Fathom is a simple, cookieless, privacy-focused website analytics tool.
What it costs: Fathom plans start at $14/month for up to 100,000 monthly page views on up to 50 websites. Yearly accounts give you 2 months free, and all plans have a 30-day free trial.
How Fathom compares to Google Analytics: Unlike GA4, Fathom uses cookieless tracking, meaning it can collect data from users who clear cookies or use ad-blockers. Fathom tracks basic analytics data, like pageviews, referral source, UTMs, and custom events, and displays it all in a one-page dashboard that is much simpler to use and understand than Google Analytics (especially GA4). If you need more advanced reporting options, a different tool, like Piwik Pro (see below), might be more suitable.
3. Piwik Pro
What it is: Piwik Pro (not to be confused with Matomo, which used to be known as Piwik!) is an advanced analytics suite and customer data platform.
What it costs: Piwik Pro’s ‘web & product analytics’ suite has a free core plan for up to 500,000 monthly actions. For enterprise plans or ‘intranet analytics’ pricing is by custom quote only.
How Piwik Pro compares to Google Analytics: Piwik Pro offers very similar core functionality to GA4: you’ll get comparable reports, like user flow, funnel analysis, and website visitor engagement. Piwik Pro also has additional features you won’t find in GA4, including a search engine optimization (SEO) dashboard that replaces some of the functionality of Google Search Console.
You can build in-depth custom reports and integrate them with Google Ads and Search Console if needed. Like Google Analytics, Piwik Pro uses cookies to track users, but it does have consent management tools to make privacy and security compliance easier.
4. Plausible Analytics
What it is: Plausible is a stripped-down, open-source, cookieless web analytics tool.
What it costs: Plausible starts at $9/month for 10,000 monthly pageviews across up to 50 websites.
How Plausible compares to Google Analytics: Plausible is a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics. It uses cookieless tracking, is built for compliance with GDPR and other privacy and data collection regulations, and displays basic metrics like unique visitors, traffic source, and visitor location on a clear one-page dashboard. Its offering is similar to Fathom’s, but with a cheaper starting price point that would suit a startup or small business.
5. Woopra
What it is: Woopra is an advanced customer journey analytics platform.
What it costs: Woopra has a free core plan for up to 500,000 actions/month. Pro plans start at $999/month.
How Woopra compares to Google Analytics: Woopra is very different from Google Analytics—it’s more of a customer journey mapping tool for ecommerce and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. Woopra tracks individual customer behavior and links it with other user data and personally identifiable Information (PII), like purchase history and product usage.
Woopra could work as an alternative to GA4 if you don’t need additional privacy features and want to combine customer and website analytics in one place.
6. Adobe Analytics
What it is: Adobe Analytics is a web analytics and business intelligence platform.
What it costs: Adobe Analytics is part of Adobe Experience Cloud but you’ll need to contact them to get a pricing quote.
How Adobe Analytics compares to Google Analytics: Adobe Analytics is a comparable alternative to Google Analytics 360 (Google’s premium analytics suite). It’s an advanced, enterprise-level software and by far the most expensive option in this list.
Adobe Analytics collates data from multiple channels like web, email, and mobile apps, and offers advanced segmentation and customization options such as multi-channel attribution and offline data integration. You’ll also be able to use it alongside the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud suite, including Adobe Campaign (for email, SMS, and direct mail campaigns), Adobe Real-Time CDP (a customer data platform), and Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.
7. Matomo Analytics
What it is: Matomo (formerly known as Piwik—nothing to do with Piwik Pro!) is an open-source web analytics platform. There are two versions: Matomo On-Premise (self-hosted) and Matomo Cloud (hosted by Matomo).
What it costs: Matomo On-Premise is free with no usage limits, but you’ll need to install it on (and pay for) a web hosting server yourself. When self-hosting, additional features like custom reports and A/B testing cost from $229/year each. Matomo Cloud starts at $23/month for up to 50,000 hits but includes the advanced features as standard and has a free trial option.
How Matomo compares to Google Analytics: Matomo offers a lot of the same functionality and reporting options as Universal Analytics. Unlike GA4, Matomo doesn’t sample website traffic, gives you complete data ownership, and uses cookieless tracking so you can capture the activity of more site visitors while complying with GDPR and other privacy guidelines. However, you’ll need enough technical knowledge to set it up on a server (unless you’re willing to pay for Matomo Cloud).
8. Clicky
What it is: Clicky is a privacy-friendly, real-time analytics tool for websites.
What it costs: Clicky costs $9.99/month or $79.99/year for 1,000,000 monthly page views.
How Clicky compares to Google Analytics: Clicky is a stripped-down analytics tool with a limited range of reports focusing on real-time data and broad metrics like number of visitors, page views, and referral source. Clicky doesn’t use cookies and all extra tools, like video analytics and Twitter analytics, are included in the price.
12 more Google Analytics alternatives to consider
Contentsquare: digital experience platform combining website and customer data
Mixpanel: product analytics software for software-as-a-service (SaaS) teams
Chartbeat: content analytics solution for online publishers
GoSquared Analytics: simple, privacy-focused website analytics tool
Kissmetrics: advanced product and digital marketing analytics
Heap: digital insights platform to map the user journey
Simple Analytics: simple, cookieless web analytics tool
Open Web Analytics: free, open-source web analytics software framework downloadable from GitHub
Independent Analytics: freemium analytics plugin for WordPress websites
Friendly Analytics: cookieless web analytics software
Slimstat Analytics: open-source analytics for WordPress
Wide Angle Analytics: cookieless website analytics
Combine analytics with behavior insights to get the complete picture
Numbers and graphs are not enough to truly understand what's happening on your website from your users' perspective.
That's why we recommend pairing your chosen GA4 alternative with Hotjar's tools—Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, Feedback, and user interviews—to eliminate the guesswork in user experience and conversion rate optimization, driving business growth while keeping your users satisfied.
Go beyond Google Analytics with Hotjar
Sign up for a free Hotjar trial and learn why website visitors convert or click away.
Google Analytics alternatives FAQs
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