Comparison
Simple Analytics takes privacy further than almost anyone else in this space. No cookies, no personal data, no IP addresses, no fingerprinting — not even anonymized. It's the most minimal possible footprint, and for some teams that's exactly the right call.
The tradeoff is depth. Simple Analytics is designed to answer one question: how much traffic did I get and where did it come from? Palace is designed to answer the questions that come next. This comparison breaks down where those differences actually matter.
Simple Analytics starts at $15/month for 20,000 pageviews, with a 14-day trial. Palace starts free, permanently, with 100,000 events per month — five times the volume before you pay anything.
Both tools gate some features behind higher plans, though Palace's model is more permissive — every plan includes the full feature set with no lockouts. Simple Analytics reserves certain capabilities for higher tiers and limits seats to 2 on mid-tier plans, with additional users billed at $20 each.
Data retention is an area where Simple Analytics does well — up to 5 years on mid-tier plans. Palace offers unlimited retention on all plans.
Simple Analytics covers the basics well: pageviews, referrers, top pages, UTM parameters, custom events. The interface lives up to the name — it's fast and uncluttered. If you run a blog, a content site, or a small product and you want a quick read on your numbers, it does the job.
Palace adds the behavioral layer that Simple Analytics doesn't have. User journey mapping shows you the actual paths visitors take through your site rather than just which pages they landed on. Funnel tracking lets you define a conversion path and watch where people drop off step by step. Engagement scoring gives you a composite signal for each visitor — time on site, scroll depth, interaction — so you can separate genuinely engaged readers from people who bounced in three seconds.
Palace also ships a full UTM management dashboard where you can build and track campaign links in-app, plus a built-in link shortener. Simple Analytics reads UTM parameters but has no tooling around them.
Both tools are cookieless, GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted, and require no consent banner. Neither will get you in trouble with regulators, and neither needs a privacy policy disclaimer about tracking cookies.
Simple Analytics goes furthest on privacy — it collects no personal data of any kind, not even anonymized IP hashes. Palace collects no personal data by default. In practice both are equivalent from a compliance standpoint, but Simple Analytics' approach is the most conservative possible, which matters to some teams.
Choose Simple Analytics if you want the absolute minimum data footprint and a no-decisions dashboard. It's the right call for content sites, personal projects, or teams where privacy posture is the primary criteria and traffic volume reporting is genuinely all you need.
Choose Palace if you need to understand behavior, not just visits. User journeys, funnels, engagement scoring, and campaign management are tools Simple Analytics was deliberately designed not to have — Palace was designed around them. And with a permanent free tier at 5x Simple Analytics' trial volume, there's no cost to finding out.
Set up takes minutes. Your first 100k events are free.
Simple, usage-based pricing from $0.00