Best Privacy-Friendly Website Analytics Tools in 2026

Privacy-friendly analytics tools count your visitors while collecting less about each of them. Some set no cookies at all, some let you run the software on your own server, and some keep a visitor identifier but let you switch it off. Those are different promises, and they change what your reports can tell you.

People switch for simpler reports than Google Analytics 4, less persistent tracking, collecting only what they need, choosing where data is hosted, and their visitors' trust. Compliance is often part of it, but no tool settles that on its own: it depends on what you collect, how you configure it and where your visitors are.

The short answer

Cookieless by default, hosted: Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics and Pirsch. They recognise a visitor for a day at most.
Open source to run yourself: Umami, Rybbit, Matomo and Plausible's Community Edition, with the maintenance that brings.
A cookie by default, cookieless optional: Matomo and SuprAnalytics. The cookie recognises returning visitors and can link a later payment to the first visit.
Need revenue by traffic source? Check how a tool links a payment to a visitor before choosing on privacy alone.

How we compared them

Our criteria: data minimisation, cookie behaviour, visitor identification, hosting flexibility, features, ease of setup and pricing transparency. This is a shortlist, not a ranking: there are no scores, and the reviews run from cookieless hosted tools to open-source tools to tools with a cookie by default.

Also considered: GoatCounter, open source and free for reasonable use, with no cookies or stored IP addresses but no goals, funnels or revenue; and Cloudflare Web Analytics, free and cookieless but with no custom events (Cloudflare says its no-personal-data claim doesn't apply to EU or UK traffic).

Comparison table

Eight tools side by side. “Cookieless” describes the browser: what the tool stores on the visitor's device. The visitor identifier column says what it uses instead, and that decides how long a visitor is recognised.

Eight website analytics tools compared by cookie approach, visitor identifier, hosting, events, revenue features, starting price and best fit
Tool	Cookie approach	Visitor identifier	Hosting	Events and goals	Revenue features	Starting price	Best for
Plausible	Cookieless by default	Daily-salted hash; salt deleted every 24 hours	Cloud (EU) or self-hosted Community Edition	Events, goals; funnels on Business	Revenue goals sent with events (Business)	$9/month for 10k pageviews; 30-day trial	Simple, EU-hosted traffic reports
Fathom	Cookieless by default	Signature rotated daily at midnight UTC	Cloud only (EU traffic's IP removed in the EU; stored in the US)	Events and goals	Event values your code sends	$15/month for 100k pageviews; 7-day trial, card required	Many sites, little upkeep
Simple Analytics	Cookieless by default	None: counts visits by referrer	Cloud only (Netherlands)	Events, goals, funnels	Not listed	Free hobby plan; paid from $20/month	The smallest data footprint
Pirsch	Cookieless by default	Daily hash of IP, user agent, date and salt	Cloud (Germany); on-premise on Enterprise	Events, goals; funnels on Plus	E-commerce revenue (Plus)	$6/month for 10k page views, excl. VAT; 30-day trial	Low-cost EU-hosted analytics
Umami	Cookieless by default	Hash with a salt that rotates monthly by default	Self-hosted (MIT) or Cloud (US or EU)	Events, goals, funnels, journeys	Revenue reports; no payment integrations named	Self-host free; Cloud free plan, Pro $20/month	Self-hosting developers
Rybbit	Cookieless by default	Hash of IP and user agent; daily salt optional	Self-hosted (AGPL) or Cloud (Germany)	Events, goals, funnels, journeys, replay	Not found	$13/month billed annually; 7-day trial; self-host free	Product analytics with self-hosting
Matomo	Cookies by default; cookieless option	13-month cookie id; up to 24 hours without cookies	Self-hosted (GPL) or Cloud (Germany)	Goals, events, ecommerce; funnels premium	Ecommerce tracking	On-Premise free; Cloud by hits, 21-day trial	Google Analytics-like depth, your control
SuprAnalytics	Cookie by default; cookieless option	1-year cookie id; daily hash when cookieless	Cloud only	Goals, funnels, journeys	Payments from 5 providers matched to visitors	$9/month for 100,000 events; 14-day trial	Tying traffic to revenue

Scroll the table sideways for every column.

Last reviewed: 27 October 2026, from each vendor's own pricing, documentation and policy pages (linked in each review). Prices are in US dollars as the vendors showed them, monthly unless stated, and change; check the vendor before you buy. Matomo Cloud's price is left out because the currency shown couldn't be confirmed.

What makes analytics privacy-friendly?

Data minimisation

Collecting only what your questions need: no stored IP addresses or full user-agent strings, location only as precise as you use, and no names or emails unless you add them.

Cookieless tracking

No cookie doesn't mean no identifier. Most cookieless tools hash the IP address and user agent with a salt on the server, and how often the salt changes decides how long a visitor is recognised: a day for Plausible, Fathom and Pirsch, a month by default in Umami, longer in Rybbit unless its optional daily salt is on.

Visitor identifiers

Identifiers make unique visitors, returning visitors and journeys possible. The longer one lasts, the more you see across visits, and the more it resembles tracking. Neither cookies nor hashes follow a person from one device to another.

Data ownership and hosting

A hosted tool processes your visitors' data on your behalf, usually under a data processing agreement (DPA); self-hosting puts it on infrastructure you control, along with the work. Check where a hosted tool stores data: Fathom, for example, strips EU visitors' IP addresses in the EU but stores the anonymised data in the US.

Retention and access controls

How long data is kept and who can see it. Pirsch lists unlimited retention, a self-hosted Umami keeps everything until you delete it, and SuprAnalytics deletes data after 2 years to 5 years, by plan. Shorter isn't automatically better, but it should be a choice.

Consent and compliance

Several vendors say their tool needs no consent banner. Those are their claims, and some qualify them: Fathom says “cookie-free does not automatically mean outside device-access rules”, and Matomo recommends treating JavaScript tracking as requiring consent. What applies to you depends on your jurisdiction, your configuration and what else you collect, such as chat messages or emails.

The tools, reviewed

Each review covers what the tool does, who it suits, how it identifies visitors, where it runs, and what it costs, with links to the vendor's own pages.

Plausible Analytics

Lightweight website analytics on a single dashboard: pageviews, sources, UTM campaigns, locations, devices, custom events and goals. Funnels, user journeys and revenue goals come with its Business plan.

Best for: Blogs, content sites and small businesses that want clear traffic reports, hosted in the EU.
Cookies and visitor identification: No cookies, local storage or persistent identifiers. A visitor is a hash of a daily salt, the domain, the IP address and the user agent; the salt is rotated and deleted every 24 hours, so someone returning the next day counts as a new visitor. Raw IP addresses and user agents aren't stored.
Hosting: Plausible Cloud keeps visitor data in the EU, on servers in Germany, with a published DPA. The free, self-hosted Community Edition (AGPLv3) leaves out funnels, user journeys and revenue goals.
Strengths: No identifier outlives the day
EU hosting and an open-source edition
Limitations: No returning visitors across days, by design
Revenue is an amount you send with a goal event, on the Business plan, with no payment-provider integration
Funnels and journeys need the Business plan
Pricing: From $9 a month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, with a 30-day free trial and no card (pricing).

SuprAnalytics vs Plausible

Fathom Analytics

Hosted, cookieless analytics on one screen, with events that can carry a value, email reports, CSV exports and an API.

Best for: Agencies and businesses running several websites that want hosted analytics with little upkeep; the entry plan includes 50 sites.
Cookies and visitor identification: No cookies and no cross-day tracking: a signature built with the IP address rotates daily at midnight UTC. Fathom notes that rotating the salt isn't the same as deleting stored records.
Hosting: Hosted only. EU isolation is on by default: EU visitors' IP addresses are removed on servers in the EU, and the anonymised data is then stored in the US. Fathom Lite, an older open-source edition, gets no new features.
Strengths: IP removal for EU traffic by default
50 or more websites on every plan
Limitations: No funnels or visitor journeys listed
Revenue is a total of event values your own code sends
A card is required for the trial
Pricing: $15 a month for up to 100,000 monthly pageviews; 7-day free trial with a card; no free plan (pricing).

SuprAnalytics vs Fathom

Simple Analytics

Hosted analytics that sets out to collect as little as possible: pageviews, referrers, UTM tags, events, goals and funnels, with CSV export and an API.

Best for: Sites that want the smallest possible data footprint and don't need visitor-level reports.
Cookies and visitor identification: No cookies, storage or fingerprinting, and no count of unique people: a pageview counts as a unique visit when it has no referrer or an external one. It drops the IP address and takes the country from the browser's time zone.
Hosting: Hosted in the Netherlands, in the EU (its GDPR page). The product isn't open source; only its scripts are public.
Strengths: No visitor identifier of any kind
A free plan for hobby sites
Limitations: No returning visitors, sessions or journeys, by design
No revenue feature listed
Country-level location only
Pricing: A free plan for hobby sites (1 user, 5 websites, 1 month of history, with a badge); paid plans from $20 a month; 14-day trial, no card (pricing).

SuprAnalytics vs Simple Analytics

Pirsch Analytics

Cookieless analytics hosted in Germany, with events, conversion goals, session analysis and UTM campaigns. Funnels and e-commerce revenue tracking come with its Plus plan.

Best for: Small sites on a budget that want EU-hosted, cookieless analytics with conversion goals.
Cookies and visitor identification: No cookies. A visitor is a hash of the IP address, user agent, date and a salt, recognised for up to 24 hours; IP addresses are never stored. Location goes down to city.
Hosting: Hosted on servers in Germany. On-premise and managed cloud are Enterprise options; its core tracking library is open source (AGPL-3.0).
Strengths: The lowest paid entry price in this list
Conversion goals on the entry plan
Limitations: No recognition across days
Funnels and revenue need the Plus plan
Custom events count toward the page-view limit
Pricing: From $6 a month for 10,000 monthly page views, excluding VAT; 30-day trial, no card; no free plan (pricing).

Umami

Open-source web analytics you can host yourself or use as Umami Cloud, with events, goals, funnels, journeys, retention and revenue reports.

Best for: Developers and open-source fans who want analytics on their own infrastructure.
Cookies and visitor identification: Its tracker doesn't use cookies. In its source code, a session id hashes the website, IP address, user agent and a salt that rotates monthly by default (configurable when self-hosted), so a browser can be recognised for up to a month.
Hosting: MIT-licensed, to self-host anywhere; self-hosted data is kept until you delete it. Umami Cloud lets you choose a US or EU data region and keeps 6 months to 5 years of data by plan.
Strengths: Permissive MIT licence
Funnels, journeys and a free cloud plan
Limitations: Self-hosting means you run upgrades, backups and security
Revenue reports are listed, but no payment-provider integrations are named
Pricing: Self-hosting is free. Umami Cloud has a free Hobby plan (100K events, 1 website) and Pro at $20 a month for 1 million events (pricing).

SuprAnalytics vs Umami

Rybbit

Open-source analytics with product-analytics features: events, goals, funnels, journeys, retention, user profiles and session replay.

Best for: SaaS teams that want journeys and session replay, with the option to self-host.
Cookies and visitor identification: No cookies or local storage for tracking, except an optional identify call. The visitor is a hash of the IP address and user agent; a daily salt is optional, and Rybbit's repository says it's off by default, though its marketing says ids are salted daily. Without it, a browser on the same network is recognised across days.
Hosting: AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable with every feature, or Rybbit Cloud on servers in Germany, with session replays stored by Cloudflare. A DPA is available.
Strengths: Funnels, journeys and replay in one tool
Self-hosting with every feature
Limitations: No revenue feature found
Session replay captures what happens on the page (form inputs are masked by default): weigh it against your privacy goals
Pricing: Rybbit Cloud from $13 a month billed annually for 100,000 pageviews; 7-day trial. Self-hosting is free (pricing).

SuprAnalytics vs Rybbit

Matomo

A full analytics platform close to Google Analytics in depth: goals, ecommerce, events, campaigns, segments and realtime, with funnels and heatmaps as premium features.

Best for: Organisations that want Google Analytics-like depth with full control of their data, and have people to configure it.
Cookies and visitor identification: Cookies by default: _pk_id stores a visitor id for 13 months, alongside a 30-minute session cookie and a 6-month referral cookie. You can disable cookies, which Matomo says reduces returning-visitor accuracy. IP addresses are masked by 2 bytes by default.
Privacy depends on configuration: Two Matomo installations can behave very differently. Matomo describes consent-free use only under specific conditions, such as cookies disabled and IP addresses anonymised, in certain jurisdictions, and recommends treating JavaScript tracking as requiring consent.
Hosting: Matomo On-Premise is free software (GPL-3.0) for your own server; Matomo Cloud is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany.
Strengths: Depth: ecommerce, segments, campaigns
Self-hosted or EU cloud, settings you control
Limitations: More setup and more settings to get right
Funnels and heatmaps are paid plugins on-premise
Cookies unless you turn them off
Pricing: On-Premise is free to download. Matomo Cloud has a 21-day free trial and is priced by monthly hits; see its pricing page for the price in your currency.

SuprAnalytics vs Matomo

Our product

SuprAnalytics

Hosted website analytics built around revenue: traffic, UTM campaigns, goals, funnels and journeys, with payments from Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle and Dodo Payments tied to the visitor and source, plus live chat.

Best for: SaaS founders and small teams who want to know which traffic sources bring paying customers.
Cookies and visitor identification: A first-party cookie by default: supr_visitor_id holds a random id for up to a year (Safari caps cookies set by a script at seven days), and supr_session_id lasts 30 minutes. That's what lets it recognise returning visitors and credit a payment to the visit that first brought the customer. With supr-cookieless="true" it sets no cookies and recognises a visitor by a daily hash of the IP address, user agent and website.
Trade-offs and data collected: The cookieless mode has costs: returning visitors and multi-day journeys aren't followed, a payment is only connected to visits from the same day, and people sharing a network and browser may count as one. IP addresses are used for location and exclusions and aren't stored. Each visit records city-level location, browser, device, language, referrer, UTM tags and pages; names and emails only if your app identifies a visitor, they type them in the chat, or a payment brings them.
Hosting: Hosted only: there's no self-hosted or open-source edition, and no hosting region or DPA page is published. Data is kept 2 years to 5 years by plan, then deleted automatically.
Strengths: Payments attributed to sources by first or last touch
Visitor journeys, goals and funnels that end in a payment
Live chat beside each visit, and unlimited websites
Limitations: Not cookieless by default, so out of the box it isn't the most private choice in this list
First-touch attribution and journeys depend on the cookie; cookieless mode limits them to a day
No self-hosting, and no CSV export (statistics leave through its MCP server)
Pricing: From $9 a month for 100,000 events; 14-day free trial, no card; no free plan (pricing).

Cookieless vs cookie-based analytics

The difference isn't whether a tool can tell visitors apart, but for how long, and where the identifier lives. Umami's monthly salt and Rybbit's unsalted hash sit between these columns.

How a first-party cookie, a daily hash and no identifier compare
What changes	First-party cookie id	Cookieless, daily hash	Cookieless, no identifier
Visitor recognition	A random id kept in the browser until it expires, is cleared, or a browser cap ends it	A hash of IP address and user agent: same network and browser, same visitor, for one day	No visitor; visits are counted by referrer
Returning visitors	Recognised on the same browser	Within the same day only	Not counted
Attribution window	As long as the cookie lasts: a payment weeks later can still credit the first visit	One day: a later payment is credited to that day's visits	No visitor to attribute to
Session continuity	Survives a change of network (Wi-Fi to mobile)	A new IP address looks like a new visitor	No sessions
Setup	One script	One script, sometimes with an attribute	One script
Consent considerations	Storing an identifier on the device usually brings cookie-consent rules into play in the EU and UK	Nothing is stored on the device, but the IP address and user agent are still processed; rules vary by jurisdiction	Processes the least; still check what your jurisdiction requires

Neither is exact. Cookies are cleared, blocked and capped (Safari limits cookies set by a script to seven days), and never cross devices. Daily hashes split one person into several visitors over a week, and can merge people on a shared network. Compare trends, not exact counts.

Hosted vs self-hosted analytics

Umami, Rybbit, Matomo and Plausible's Community Edition can run on your own server; the others here are hosted (Pirsch offers on-premise on Enterprise). The trade is control for work.

Hosted and self-hosted analytics compared
Consideration	Hosted	Self-hosted
Operational overhead	The vendor runs servers, scaling and monitoring	You run the application, its database and its uptime
Maintenance and upgrades	Applied for you	Yours to schedule and test; Plausible's Community Edition, for example, is released twice a year
Data control	Processed by the vendor on your behalf, usually under a DPA	On infrastructure you choose, in the region you choose
Security responsibilities	The vendor's, for their side; yours for access and settings	Yours: patches, backups, access control, encryption
Infrastructure costs	A subscription	Servers, storage and the time to look after them
Privacy configuration	The vendor's defaults, plus the options they expose	Every setting is yours, including the ones that collect more

Self-hosting doesn't make analytics private by itself. A self-hosted Matomo with cookies on and full IP addresses kept collects more than a hosted, cookieless tool. What matters is the configuration, who can reach the server, and how long the data is kept. Self-hosting also doesn't settle legal questions: you become the one running the processing.

How privacy affects revenue attribution

Attribution asks which visit led to a sale. The answer depends on whether the tool can tell that the person paying today is the one who visited last week. A fictional example:

Day 1Maya finds a SaaS product through a Reddit thread, reads the pricing page and leaves.
Day 5She comes back by typing the address, starts a trial and pays $29.
AfterwardsThe analytics tool tries to connect that payment to the Reddit visit.

With a persistent first-party cookie

On the same browser, day 5 is recognised as a returning visit. First-touch attribution credits Reddit; last-touch credits Direct. It breaks if Maya pays from another device, cleared her cookies, or the cookie expired (in Safari, after seven days).

With a daily-rotating hash

Day 5 is a new visitor. The payment can only be credited to that day's visit, which came in as Direct. Reddit gets credit for a visit, not for a customer.

With no visitor identifier

The payment can't be tied to any visitor. You see Reddit traffic and sales, separately.

Not every tool attributes payments. Plausible and Fathom record revenue as an amount sent with an event, in the visit where it fired; Simple Analytics and Rybbit don't list a revenue feature. SuprAnalytics takes payments from the provider's webhook, matches each to a visitor by visitor id, customer id or email, and credits the source by first or last touch; in cookieless mode the one-day limit applies.

Which tool should you choose?

Start from what you need to know, then pick the least invasive tool that answers it.

A privacy-conscious personal website: Simple Analytics' free hobby plan collects the least. GoatCounter is free and open source too. Plausible or Pirsch if you want regions and goals.
An open-source enthusiast: Umami (MIT) or Plausible's Community Edition (AGPLv3). Rybbit (AGPL-3.0) if you also want session replay.
A team that wants to self-host: Matomo On-Premise for depth; Umami or Rybbit for something lighter. Budget the time for upgrades and backups.
A SaaS founder tracking conversions: Plausible's Business plan for goals and funnels, Rybbit for funnels, journeys and replay, or Pirsch Plus for funnels on a budget.
A founder who needs traffic-to-revenue attribution: SuprAnalytics, with its cookie on, to credit payments from five payment providers to the first or last visit. Plausible's revenue goals work when the purchase happens in the same visit.
A small business that wants simple reports: Fathom (many sites included), Plausible, or Simple Analytics.

Conclusion

“Privacy-friendly” covers several different choices. Cookieless tools store nothing in the browser but still process IP addresses; a daily hash forgets visitors overnight; self-hosting moves the data and the work to you; and no tool makes a website compliant by itself. The more a tool remembers about a visitor, the more it can tell you about returning visitors, journeys and which visit led to a sale, and the more care it needs.

The best choice depends on your privacy requirements, technical resources and reporting needs. For simple traffic reports, a cookieless hosted tool is hard to beat; for full control, an open-source tool you host; for connecting traffic to revenue across several days, an identifier that lasts, used deliberately.

Frequently asked questions

What is privacy-friendly website analytics?

Analytics that measures how a website is used while collecting less about each visitor: often no cookies, no stored IP addresses and no advertising use. It isn't one standard, so read what each tool collects and for how long.

Can website analytics work without cookies?

Yes. Six tools here set no cookies by default, and Matomo and SuprAnalytics have a cookieless mode. Most then recognise visitors with a hash computed on the server; Simple Analytics keeps no identifier at all.

Does cookieless analytics identify returning visitors?

It depends. A daily-rotating hash (Plausible, Fathom, Pirsch, SuprAnalytics' cookieless mode) recognises a visitor for one day; Umami's default monthly salt lasts longer; Simple Analytics doesn't count returning visitors at all.

Are privacy-friendly analytics tools automatically GDPR-compliant?

No tool makes you compliant by itself. Several vendors say no consent banner is needed, but compliance depends on your jurisdiction, configuration, privacy notice and whatever else you collect. This isn't legal advice.

What is the difference between cookieless and anonymous analytics?

Cookieless means nothing is stored in the browser. Anonymous is a stronger claim: that the data can't be linked back to a person. A cookieless tool can still process IP addresses, and a tool that stores names and emails isn't anonymous for those visitors.

Can privacy-focused analytics track conversions and revenue?

Conversions, yes: most have events and goals, several have funnels. Revenue varies: Plausible and Fathom take amounts sent with events, and SuprAnalytics matches payments from five payment providers to visitors. Crediting a sale to an earlier visit needs an identifier that lasts until the sale.

Is self-hosted analytics more private than hosted analytics?

Not automatically. Self-hosting decides where data lives, not what is collected, and running it securely becomes your job.

What should I consider before replacing Google Analytics?

List the questions you use it for and check each candidate against them: sources, campaigns, goals, funnels, revenue, hosting, and how long visitors are recognised. Run both for a few weeks, expect different numbers, and export what you need first. Some tools can import its history; SuprAnalytics can't.

Sources

Read on 27 October 2026. Products change; check the vendor's own pages before you decide.