Compare Analytics Tools

The privacy-first analytics market settled on a pricing model early: charge per pageview or event, scale up as you grow. Most tools on this list follow that pattern. Where they differ is in what's locked behind higher tiers.

Palace starts free — 100,000 events per month, all features included, no trial clock running. Plausible and Fathom both offer 30-day trials before billing starts. Simple Analytics gives you 14 days. Google Analytics is free in the sense that you're not invoiced — but you pay in data.

The more important distinction is feature gating. Plausible and Simple Analytics reserve certain features for higher plans. Fathom keeps things simpler with a single tier, which we respect. Palace takes the same approach: every plan includes everything. No upsells, no seat fees, no artificial limits on the number of sites or team members.

The core feature set — pageviews, sessions, referrers, custom events, UTM tracking — is table stakes at this point. Every tool on this list handles it. The gaps start to show when you ask harder questions.

Where does a visitor go after they land on your pricing page? Which step in your signup flow loses the most people? Which blog posts actually drive trial signups rather than just traffic? These are the questions that move a business, and they're the ones that most privacy-first analytics tools leave unanswered.

Palace adds user journey mapping, funnel tracking, an engagement score, a built-in UTM dashboard, and an automatic link shortener to the standard toolkit. User journeys show you the actual paths people take through your site — not a flow diagram you constructed in advance, but the real sequences. Funnels let you define a conversion path and see exactly where people drop off. Engagement score gives each visitor a composite signal based on time, depth, and interaction — a single number that separates your genuinely engaged readers from your bounced traffic. The UTM dashboard lets you build, manage, and track campaigns without leaving the app — and the built-in link shortener means your tracking URLs don't have to be ugly.

None of the other tools on this list offer these. Google Analytics has a version of funnels, but only on the $50,000+/month GA360 tier.

On privacy, the Google Analytics alternatives on this list are genuinely equivalent. Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Palace are all cookieless, all GDPR-compliant, all EU-hosted, and none require a cookie consent banner. This is the baseline that pushed people toward privacy-friendly analytics in the first place, and every tool here clears it.

The differences are in the details. Simple Analytics collects no personal data whatsoever — not even anonymized. Fathom stores anonymized IP hashes. Plausible aggregates without storing any IP. Palace collects no personal data by default, consistent with GDPR requirements without configuration.

Where Google Analytics stands apart — and not in a good way — is that it remains banned or legally contested in several EU countries due to data transfers to US servers. The others on this list don't have that problem.