Open the admin panel of almost any small website and you will find the same free tool, installed years ago by someone who has since left, sending every visit to a dashboard nobody has fully figured out. Google Analytics is the default because it costs nothing, and because it costs nothing, almost nobody reads the settings. One of them is a retention clock. On a standard property, Google lets you keep user-level data for two months or fourteen months, and the longer retention options on its help page are marked for the paid 360 tier only. Your traffic history is free, and it is also on loan.
A growing shelf of open source analytics tools is built on a simpler idea: the numbers should stay where the website is.
What an open source Google Analytics alternative actually is
The good ones look nothing like GA4. Instead of a hundred reports, you get one page: visitors, pages, referrers, countries, devices, a few goals. Most of them, by their own READMEs, track without cookies. You run the whole thing on a server you control, or pay the people who wrote it to run it for you, and either way the code is public, so you can check what it collects.
Umami is the one most people land on first. It is MIT licensed, it has close to forty thousand stars on GitHub (repo), and its README describes it as “no cookies, no surveillance, self-hosted or in the cloud.” Version 3.4.0 shipped on September 17. If you do not want a server at all, Umami's own cloud has a free Hobby plan for one website and up to 100,000 events a month with six months of history, and Pro is $20 a month for a million events (checked Oct 22, 2026).
Plausible is the other name you will hear. It is AGPL licensed with about thirty thousand stars (repo), it comes as a managed cloud or a self-hosted community edition, and its README says plainly that no personal data or IP addresses are stored and no cookies are used.
Matomo is the grown-up of the group, the one that feels most like the tool it replaces. It is GPL-3.0 with about twenty-two thousand stars (repo), and it is moving fast right now: version 5.14.2 and the seventh beta of Matomo 6 both went out on October 22, the day this post was written. Its pricing page lists the self-hosted Community edition as “Free forever” with unlimited users and hits.
The difference is not the dashboard. It is who decides how long your history lives. Self-host the tool and the retention setting is the size of your disk.
The bill it cancels
Google Analytics has no invoice, so the bill here is not money. It is three smaller things that add up. The first is that clock: two months or fourteen months of user-level data on a standard property, and Google's own help page adds that age, gender and interest data are always cut at two months, whatever you choose. The second is that the data lives in someone else's account, under someone else's terms, mixed into an advertising business. The third is time, because GA4 is built for a marketing team with a measurement plan, and most of us just wanted to know whether yesterday's post got read.
The paid privacy tools fix the second and third problems and charge for it. Fathom starts at $15 a month for up to 100,000 pageviews, with no free plan and a 7-day trial (checked Oct 22, 2026). Simple Analytics is free for hobby sites with one month of history and a badge, and its paid plan starts at €20 a month at 100,000 pageviews. Both are fair prices for a service someone else runs. The open source tools are the only ones where the answer to “how much and for how long” is up to you.
It is a wave, not one app
The shelf is longer than the three names above. Rybbit is a newer AGPL project with about thirteen thousand stars that pitches itself directly as a Google Analytics alternative, and it shipped version 2.9.0 in September. OpenPanel, AGPL with about seven thousand stars, mixes web analytics with product analytics and calls itself an alternative to Mixpanel; it pushed new builds on October 21 and again today. GoatCounter is the minimalist, a hosted service its site says is free “for reasonable public usage,” with donations covering the servers, and you can host it yourself too. And if you want product analytics, session replay and feature flags in one box, PostHog keeps its code public, with an MIT-licensed FOSS edition (repo).
Our own catalog shows how far this has gone. Of the 148 analytics tools live on AppClap today, 28 are open source and 40 can be self-hosted. More than half, 77, have a free tier of some kind. “Free analytics” used to mean one product. Now it is a category.
What you actually take on
Here is where Google earns its place. GA4 is free, it links directly to Google Ads and Search Console from its own admin panel, and Ads campaigns show up inside its reports. Most marketers and agencies you might hire already know their way around it. If you buy ads from Google, the attribution alone is reason to keep it. None of the tools above will tell you which keyword in which campaign turned into a sale with the same depth.
Self-hosting also means you are the ops team. An analytics server collects a write on every page view, so it needs a database that is backed up, updates that get applied, and someone who notices when the tracking script quietly stops loading. If that server dies, you lose exactly the history you moved here to protect. The hosted versions from Umami, Plausible and Matomo solve that for a monthly fee, and for a lot of small teams that is the honest middle: open code you could take with you, run by someone whose job it is.
- 1Do you mostly want to know which pages get read and where readers came from?
- 2Does it bother you that your traffic history expires on someone else's schedule?
- 3Is someone on your team comfortable keeping a small server and its database backed up?
- 4Are you free of a Google Ads setup that depends on GA4 for attribution?
This series has been walking down a hallway of paid-app doors: dictation and meeting notes, the deploy platform and the inbox, the CRM, the login at the front of the house, the mailbox at the end of the drive. This one is a little different, because the door was never locked and nobody sent a bill. It is the visitor book in the hallway, the record of everyone who came in, and it turns out it was written in someone else's ink. We keep writing these at AppClap because a search engine for software should put the free, owned option on the same page as the one with the biggest brand, and then get out of your way. Our Google Analytics alternatives page lists everything we track, or describe it the way you would to a friend: simple website analytics I can host myself without cookies. Before your next fourteen months roll off the end, it is worth thirty seconds on the question this series keeps coming back to. Do you want to borrow your numbers, or keep them?
