Top 25 Best Google Analytics Alternatives to Consider

Just about everyone uses Google Analytics. But is that because it’s the best web analytics tool out there? Or because it’s free and the industry default? Might there be a better google analytics alternative we just don’t know about yet?

In our experience, we think it’s often the latter. Don’t get us wrong—GA can be a great tool, and in-fact it serves a purpose in our internal modern data stack. But it can’t answer every question you have about how users behave in your product, for example, or how engaged your users are beyond superficial metrics like page views for example.

Below, we cover why it might be worth supplementing your GA with an additional analytics tool. Then we share the top 25 Google Analytics alternatives, including tools for:

• Product Analytics
• User and audience analytics
• Conversion analytics
• Behavioral analytics
• Content analytics
• Data visualization
• And more

Web analytics refers to the measurement of website and visitor data. Most companies today use web analytics in one form or another to measure and improve website and marketing performance. Metrics like bounce rate, page views, session duration, unique visitors, and traffic sources are all part of web analytics

Google Analytics is, by far, the reigning web analytics platform for much of the web today. It was built to help marketers analyze website performance and is available for free to anyone who owns a domain. It’s great for getting an overview of your website traffic and tracking things like sessions, page views, time on site, and conversion milestones.

With GA, you can answer questions like:

• Which blog post on our site brings in the most visitors?
• Does our Facebook Ad campaign send engaged visitors to the site?
• Which referral source leads to the lowest bounce rate?

When we talk about web analytics, too many companies install Google Analytics and call it a day. That leads many to try and contort GA into doing things it wasn’t designed for and can’t effectively do.

There are a lot of questions Google Analytics just can’t answer for product managers, marketers, and data analysts—and even more questions that other analytics tools can answer faster, easier, and more accurately.

See, Google’s data is limited and imperfect thanks to the constraints of its tracking, bot traffic, and ad-blockers, among other things especially when comparing google analytics vs customer analytics. Since Google uses session-based cookies to track web users, for example, it’s basically impossible to unify customer behavior across devices and throughout the customer lifecycle.

That’s why GA can’t tell you:

• Who your best, most engaged customers are
• Which steps those customers take along your funnel
• How they behave inside your product
• What your most profitable path to conversion looks like

To answer questions like that, you need a Product Analytics solution—not instead of Google Analytics, but in addition to it.

Plus, there are a whole host of other limitations and issues with Google Analytics:

• A big learning curve that makes it hard for beginners to use GA
• An interface is crowded with tons of data you may or may not need
• A lot of setup and customization required to get in-depth insights or advanced analytics
• Limited visualization and report-building features

Because of all those limitations, it’s worth considering whether Google Analytics is enough to serve as your entire analytics stack—or if supplementing with another tool may help you answer more questions, becoming more data-driven and effective as a result.

How to Choose the Right Analytics Tool for You

There are several things to keep in mind as you look to find the web analytics tool that will work best for you:

• What kind of data you need: User-level data, session-based analytics, or specific metrics, for example)
• Who needs to be able to access and use the data: Does your analytics tool need to make sense to non-technical users? Do you need to build reports for the C suite?
• The privacy regulations you need to follow: Do you serve customers in the EU or somewhere else with specific privacy regulations?
• Budget: How much can you afford to spend?
• Compatibility: Will you need to export the data to another system or integrate your analytics with the rest of your data stack?

Your team’s Google Analytics experience: Are they already familiar with and skilled at using GA?

Below, we cover each of these analytics tools in-depth and broken down by category—Product Analytics, user and audience analytics, conversion analytics, behavioral analytics, content analytics, and data visualization—along with privacy-focused, open source, and free Google Analytics alternatives.

If you want to know more about who your users are and how they behave in, and move through, your app or other digital product, you need Product Analytics. With a Product Analytics tool like Indicative, you can discover things like:

• Who your best, most engaged customers are
• The steps they follow along your customer journey funnel
• How they move through your product, including where they get stuck and why
• Your most profitable conversion paths

That knowledge enables product teams to build products customers love, banish churn, and grow revenue.

Note: you can learn more about Product Analytics here.

Product Analytics

Indicative

Indicative is Product Analytics for your data warehouse. Built for product managers, marketers, and data analysts, the solution gives you a full, holistic view into who your users are, how they use your product, and what makes them convert.

With tools like a unique multipath funnel, exploratory customer journey analysis, and cohort analysis, Indicative helps you build a better product and drive product-led growth by reducing churn, increasing retention, encouraging upgrades, and boosting revenue.

Indicative price: Limited free plan and first 25 million events free; paid plans start at $249/month for unlimited users and access to all features

Features offered:

• Multipath funnel and customer journey analysis
• Cohort analysis and segmentation
• Direct data warehouse integration
• Dashboards and reporting

Privacy compliance:

• EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework compliant
• First-party cookies, which can be refused
• Full data governance and controls

Note: you can dive in and explore our public demo right now.

PostHog

PostHog is a Product Analytics platform with a robust open source option. The tool uses autocapture to collect all your event data. Since it’s self-hosted, PostHog is great for product teams in privacy-focused industries who need more control over the data they collect.

Features include funnels and cohort and retention analysis, along with session recordings and feature flags.

PostHog price: Free open source option for up to 1 project and 1 million events; paid plans start at $2,000/month for hosting, additional features, and collaboration options

Features offered:

• Event pipelines
• Session recordings
• Feature flags
• Analytics

Privacy compliance:

• Open source option
• No third-party cookies for self-hosted option
• Code audit support for compliance and security

User and Audience Analytics

Alternatives in this category are built to give you more insight into who is on your website.

Google Analytics doesn’t focus much on individual users. That’s partly due to the way GA measures website engagement, which makes it hard to actually track users over time and across devices. These tools solve that.

Oribi

Oribi is one of the best Google Analytics alternatives we’ve found. The tool automatically tracks all events, so you don’t need a developer to help set it up. Oribi favors to-the-point insights instead of endless reports. Plus, you can view the whole customer journey, making it easier to build funnels, draw correlations between events, and attribute conversions to your marketing campaigns.

Orbib price: Free 7-day trial; paid plans starts at $450/month for eCommerce shops, $540/month for business websites, and $750/month for marketing agencies

Features offered:

• Channel analysis
• Funnel optimization
• Visitor journey and email capture
• Smart audiences

Privacy compliance:

• Only collects anonymized data
• Full data governance and controls
• GDPR compliant

Kissmetrics

In contrast to Google Analytics, Kissmetrics takes a user-level approach to web analytics, connecting every action that happens on your site to a real person.

This approach allows Kissmetrics to show you in-depth behavioral data, along with analysis of the full customer journey. The tool also includes A/B testing features to help measure the impact of changes to your site.

Kissmetrics price: Starts at $299/month for the Silver plan, which includes 3 users, and requires an annual agreement

Features offered:

• Dashboards
• Funnel and path reports
• People search
• Cohort report

Privacy compliance:

• Complies with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework and the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield
• Customers choose whether to abide by Do Not Track requests
• Any user can opt out of all Kissmetrics tracking

Quantcast

Quantcast offers a suite of tools that include digital advertising, audience analytics, and traditional web analytics. Designed for brands, agencies, and publishers, the tool makes it easy for marketers to get more insight into both their audience and how well their campaigns perform.

Quantcast is also leading the charge to ensure analytics and digital advertising remain viable in a world without third-party cookies—making it a great choice for privacy-focused companies.

Quantcast price: Contact Quantcast for pricing

Features offered:

• Psychographic audience data
• Web analytics
• AI topic mapping
• Digital advertising

Privacy compliance: 

• First-party data
• Opt-in consent
• Industry standard compliance (board of IAB Europe, Prebid, W3C)
• GDPR compliance guaranteed

FoxMetrics

FoxMetrics is a behavioral data platform that combines web analytics with more holistic marketing analytics to offer a single view of the customer. With the tool, you can track sessions, users, page views, and custom events—along with out-of-the-box marketing analytics broken down by campaign, product, and more across all channels

FoxMetrics price: Limited free plan, $299/month Growth plan, or custom Enterprise plan available

Features offered:

• Custom dashboards
• Inbound data validation
• Custom data models
• White glove implementation

Privacy compliance: Unknown

Conversion Analytics

While GA’s website analytics are great for marketers, many other roles just need the bottom line—how does the website contribute to conversions? You can get that information from Google Analytics, but it takes a lot of setup and experience working with the tool.

The solutions below are designed to streamline reporting to conversion only and make for quicker set up of conversion tracking.

Splitbee

Splitbee promises a web analytics and conversion platform that’s lighter, faster, and much easier to use than Google Analytics. The UI is cleaner and more streamlined and offers traffic, user, and conversion analytics to help optimize your online business. Plus, Splitbee’s lightweight code ensures they won’t slow your site down.

Splitbee price: Limited free plan; paid plans start at $14/month for additional events and features

Features offered:

• A/B testing
• Automations
• User explorer
• Drop-off insights

Privacy compliance: 

• Collects personal data including cookies, usage data, and email address
• Does not honor Do Not Track requests
• Users are responsible for third-party personal data and securing consent

Statcounter

Statcounter is a visitor analytics software aimed at helping business owners stay up to date on the most crucial data from their website. The tool offers analytics dashboards and over-time landing page, conversion, and paid traffic analysis. Plus, Statcounter allows you to see a real-time feed of visitors on your site and replay past user sessions.

Statcounter price: Free Basic plan to analyze your most recent 500 page views; upgrade to Premium starting at €7/month

Features offered:

• Landing page analysis
• Conversion tracking
• Paid traffic analysis
• Visitor labels and alerts

Privacy compliance:

• Statcounter doesn’t collect personally-identifiable information (PII)
• GDPR compliant
• Allows users to control how long their visitors’ data is stored in the tool

Behavioral Analytics

While google analytics can tell you the numbers behind website visits, it can’t tell you how users actually behave on your web pages. Behavioral analytics offer features like heatmaps and session replays that can give you a better understanding of what visitors do once they land on your website.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg’s approach to analytics focuses more on user behavior across your website or app versus traditional web analytics data.

The tool offers heatmaps to give you a sense of aggregate browsing behavior on your site, along with website recordings to hone in on specific sessions and A/B testing features to help measure the impact of website changes on user behavior.

Crazy Egg price: 30-day free trial; paid plans are based primarily on usage and start at $24/month

Features offered:

• Heatmaps
• Website session recordings
• A/B testing

Privacy compliance:

• Largely up to the user to ensure compliance
• Any visitor can opt out of Crazy Egg tracking

Clicky

If you thought Google Analytics offered a lot of features, Clicky offers even more. On top of standard web analytics, Clicky adds heat maps, detailed user-level data, on-site analytics, referrer spam and bot filtering, backlink analytics, dynamic goals, and more. 

Plus, the tool is fully responsive, so you can use it even on your phone or tablet.

Clicky price: Free 21-day trial and limited free plan; paid plans start at $9.99/month for premium features

Features offered:

• Real-time data and goal tracking
• Contextual on-site analytics
• Individual visitor data
• Heatmaps

Privacy compliance:

• First-party cookies
• May collect personal data
• Complies with EU and Swiss Privacy Shield frameworks
• Opt out offered

Hitsteps

Hitsteps brings together in-depth SEO and web analytics with behavior analysis features like heatmaps, but the tool’s main differentiator is real-time analytics. Where Google and other web analytics tools have at least some built-in delay, Hitsteps doesn’t. The live dashboard updates right away—you can watch users as they move through your site and funnel and even live chat with visitors at the same time.

Hitsteps price: Limited free plan; paid plans start at $4.99/month and scale largely based on usage and data history

Features offered:

• Live dashboard
• Page analysis
• Heatmaps
• Live support with visitors

Privacy compliance:

• Hitsteps doesn’t track personal information like IP addresses
• GDPR-compliance ready

Content Analytics

On top of GA, content marketers need analytics that can bring data from social media, search, and other sources together into one dashboard—making it easier to measure the impact of their content. The tools below are designed to do just that.

Chartbeat

Chartbeat is designed for publishers and other content teams. With Chartbeat, you can bring more of your content analytics under one roof. Integrate with Facebook, Google, and your app to bring in more data and combine multiple sites into one dashboard. From there, the app allows you to filter data by the things that matter for content: section, author, subscriber status, and more. 

Chartbeat price: Contact Chartbeat for pricing

Features offered:

• Dashboards and reports
• Contextual analytics overlaid right on your web pages
• Headline and image testing
• Video analytics dashboard

Privacy compliance:

• Customers choose the data they share
• You can turn on cookieless mode
• Optional Datastream add-on offers improved data governance

Parse.ly

Now part of WordPress VIP, Parse.ly is one of few web analytics companies that focuses specifically on content. As such, the tool brings together analytics from nearly every channel, platform, and content type. Then it narrows in on the metrics that matter for content marketing, making it a much more streamlined tool than Google Analytics.

Parse.ly price: Parse.ly offers 3 plans; contact the company for pricing

Features offered:

• 30+ audience metrics
• Conversions reporting
• Attribution analytics
• Shadow traffic analysis

Privacy compliance: 

• First-party data
• Both session and persistent cookies
• Compliance largely falls to Parse.ly users
• Option to opt out of all Parse.ly tracking

Data Visualization

GA gives you a lot of data, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of visualization. That can make it harder for people who aren’t number-oriented to make quick sense of what their analytics are saying.

The analytics tools below are designed to help with that by turning the numbers into powerful and beautiful visualizations.

GoSquared Analytics

Dashboards are the focus for GoSquared. They’re designed to be beautiful and easily digestible for anyone in the org, on any device. Plus, it’s plug-and-play—as soon as you add GoSquared to your website, your dashboards populate and come to life.

GoSquared price: 7-day free trial; plans start at $9/month

Features offered:

• Pre-built, real-time dashboards
• Multiple project tracking
• UTM campaigns
• Event tracking

Privacy compliance:

• Data is anonymized be default
• Visitor data is used for your analytics—and that’s all
• GDPR compliant

Gauges

Owned by ReportGarden, Gauges is one of the most affordable web analytics tools out there. The dashboard streamlines your data to keep the most important and actionable numbers front and center—referrers, page views and people, and most viewed pages—and makes it easy to toggle between multiple sites.

Gauges price: Plans start at $6/month for 100,000 page views per month

Features offered:

• Streamlined dashboard
• Real-time data
• Quick and easy sharing
• Multiple sites

Privacy compliance:

• May use cookies and collect personal data
• GDPR and EU and Swiss Privacy Shield compliant

Free Google Analytics Alternatives

There are several alternatives besides google analytics that offer supplemental analytics at no cost—and others that charge for higher tiers, but offer capable free plans.

Note: some of the alternatives listed in the  open source and privacy-focused sections below are also free.

Piwik PRO

Piwik PRO is a full-featured web and customer analytics suite. The free Core plan includes most of the traditional web and customer journey analytics with a user interface that’s similar to Google Analytics—but in plain language.

Users can also upgrade to the Enterprise plan to access Piwik’s full customer data platform (CDP).

Piwik price: The Core plan is free forever; the Enterprise plan is custom quoted

Features offered:

• Audience, attribution, and behavior reporting
• Customer journey analysis and funnels
• Customizable dashboards
• Consent manager

Privacy compliance: 

• Consent manager
• GDPR consent requests for EEA residents
• Multiple tracking options
• Opt-out mechanism

W3Counter

With W3Counter, you can get all the most important web analytics in a simple dashboard or report. A part of Awio Web Services, the app includes the standard breakouts for traffic source, location, language, and device. Plus, you can see individual visitors who visit your site and follow the exact path they take.

W3Counter price: Free forever plan; paid plans start at $5/month

Features offered:

• Web stats dashboards and reports
• Website widgets for pop-ups, forms, banners, opt-ins, and more
• Conversion and revenue tracking
• Marketing link builder

Privacy compliance:

• May collect or store personal data
• Largely falls to customer to ensure compliance
• Offers easy opt-out

Google Analytics Alternatives for Privacy

Most analytics companies today are talking about privacy and tracking—between government regulations and consumer concerns, they have to. The alternatives below go above and beyond to ensure your analytics are privacy compliant.

Fathom

Many web analytics companies talk a big game about user privacy, but Fathom backs it up. The tool is GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, and PECR compliant, and they don’t use cookies—meaning you don’t have to get user consent for cookies either.

Beyond privacy, Fathom focuses on simplifying web analytics so users can get all the data they really need on one screen.

Fathom price: 7-day free trial; plans start at $14/month for up to 100,000 monthly page views and unlimited sites

Features offered:

• Simplified web analytics dashboard
• UTM and event tracking
• Bypass ad-blockers
• Uptime monitoring

Privacy compliance: 

• GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, PECR compliant
• No cookies whatsoever

Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics—as the name suggests—exists to make web analytics simpler and cleaner for marketers, analysts, and developers alike.

The company differentiates itself from Google Analytics by showing users only the headlines: page views, referrers, top pages, and screen sizes. Simple doesn’t use cookies or track users, so it’s great for privacy.

Simple Analytics price: starts at $19/month for the Starter plan and $59/month for the Business plan

Features offered:

• Dashboard
• Email reports
• In-depth tweet viewer
• Option to bypass ad-blockers

Privacy compliance: 

• No cookies (GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant)
• No IP address collection
• Anonymized user agents
• Do Not Track support

Friendly

A web analytics tool focused on privacy, Friendly Analytics works on top of another tool—Matomo. It offers all the standard web metrics you expect, including page views, time on page, and conversions. Plus, the tool boasts a powerful tag manager to help you get even deeper insights.

Friendly Analytics price: Free 14-day trial; paid plans start at $9/month

Features offered:

• Goals and ecommerce tracking
• Funnels
• Import from Google Analytics
• Tag manager

Privacy compliance: 

• Friendly doesn’t store PII from your visitors
• The tool doesn’t set cookies, so you don’t need to worry about adding a consent banner to your site
• Other data is stored in compliance with both GDPR and FADP

Matomo

Matomo is a privacy-friendly web analytics tool with the option to self-host your system and install on-premise or choose the cloud option and let Matomo host your data. Either way, privacy is front and center with support for privacy regulations like GDPR and even HIPAA.

Matomo price: Free for standard reports on-premise while add-on features vary from $19 – $579/year; cloud plans start at $29/month

Features offered:

• Customizable dashboard
• On-premise or cloud
• User, campaign, event, ecommerce, and content tracking
• Segmentation

Privacy compliance:

• Customers maintain 100% data ownership
• Self-hosted on-premise installation option
• Support for GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, and PECR

Open Source Google Analytics Alternatives

The Google Analytics alternatives below are open source, making them more flexible and affordable than some of the options above.

GoatCounter

GoatCounter is an open source alternative to Google Analytics that allows users to self-host their own app or use the company’s hosted service.

The straightforward dashboard shows page views and unique visits for each page over time, and users can also get a quick rundown of top referrers, locations, and browsers, systems, and screen size.

GoatCounter price: Free plan for non-commercial use; paid plans start at €5/month

Features offered:

• JavaScript integration
• Hosted service or self-hosted app
• Accessible interface

Privacy compliance:

• No PII collected
• Doesn’t share information with third parties
• May or may not require GDPR consent notice

umami

Built to be simple and actionable, umami tracks only the most vital web analytics (page views, devices, and referrers) and displays them in a UI that’s similar to Google, but much simpler.

The tool is open source—with the code available on Github—and self-hosted. So you can bypass ad-blockers and fully control the data you collect. Plus, the code is completely free to use.

umami price: 100% free

Features offered:

• Unlimited websites
• Even tracking
• Unique shareable link
• Mobile-friendly UI

Privacy compliance:

• No personal data collected
• GDPR compliant
• No need for a cookie or consent notice

66Analytics

66Analytics offers a traditional self-hosted and open source web analytics platform that promises 5-minute installation and streamlined, attractive, easy to understand analytics. While dashboards are the heart of 66Analytics, they’re also beta testing heatmap and session replay features.

The company also offers a “start your own paid service” option to build out a native analytics tool and bring on customers of your own.

66Analytics price: One-time $79 regular license includes unlimited websites and free future updates

Features offered:

• Dashboard
• UTM and goal tracking
• Start your own paid service option
• Visitor behavior

Privacy compliance:

• 66Analytics customers are responsible for compliance

Counter

Counter is an open source web analytics tool hosted on GitHub and built for simplicity. The dashboard surfaces data like visits, sources, countries, entry pages, and more—but everything is displayed in the clearest visual way. Plus, it’s the rare Google Analytics alternative that’s both free and offers the privacy compliance today’s companies need.

Counter price: 100% free

Features offered:

• Simple, digestible dashboard
• Daily unique visitors
• Referrers
• Free and privacy-friendly

Privacy compliance:

• No cookies, logging, or IP address fingerprinting
• No personal data collected
• Customers have full control over their users’ data
• GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant

The Google Analytics alternatives we’ve covered above offer a ton of options for analytics of all kinds. There’s something to help everyone take their analytics a step beyond GA, answer more questions, and become more data-driven.

If becoming more data-driven means you need a Product Analytics solution, you can try Indicative for free.