Privacy-Friendly Google Analytics Alternatives With a Free Tier or Self-Hosting (2026)

If you want site analytics without paying and without a cookie on every visitor, start with Cloudflare Web Analytics (free, no cookies, no event cap) or Umami Cloud's Hobby plan (free up to 100K events a month). If you would rather run it yourself, Umami (MIT), GoatCounter and Plausible Community Edition are free to self-host. PostHog has the largest free hosted allowance, 1M events a month, but it sets cookies unless you switch on cookieless mode.

Seven tools qualify: each has a free hosted tier, a free self-hosted edition, or both. Every limit, price and license below was checked against each vendor's own page on 11 November 2026.

What counts here

A tool makes the list if you can use it for a real site without paying: a hosted free tier that renews, or source code you can self-host at no license cost. A 7- or 30-day trial does not count. Fathom and Pirsch get a short section at the end for that reason.

For each tool there are three things to check:

• Free limit: events or pageviews per month, sites, and how long data is kept.
• Cookies: whether the default script stores anything in the visitor's browser.
• Self-host license: MIT, AGPL-3.0, EUPL or none.

Side by side

Tool	Free hosted tier	Cookies by default	Self-host	License
Cloudflare Web Analytics	Free; 10 sites unproxied, 6 months data	No	No	Proprietary
Umami	100K events/month, 1 site, 6 months	No	Yes	MIT
PostHog	1M events/month, 1 project, 1 year	Yes (cookieless mode optional)	Yes, unsupported	MIT
GoatCounter	Free for "reasonable public usage"	No	Yes	EUPL 1.2 (modified)
Vercel Web Analytics	50K events/month on Hobby, 1-month window	No (request hash)	No	Proprietary
Plausible	30-day trial only	No	Yes (Community Edition)	AGPL-3.0
Rybbit	7-day trial only	No	Yes	AGPL-3.0

Hosted, with a free tier

Cloudflare Web Analytics: free, with no event cap

Best for: small sites that want pageviews, referrers and Core Web Vitals for nothing.

Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and, per Cloudflare, uses no cookies or localStorage and does not fingerprint visitors. You add a JavaScript beacon, or switch it on for a site already proxied through Cloudflare. The limits page caps sites that are not proxied at 10; proxied sites have no limit.

The trade-offs are in the FAQ: you can see the previous six months of data, there are no UTM parameters and no custom events yet, and unsampled data is kept for 7 days before it is aggregated to around 10%. Cloudflare also says ad blockers block the beacon. It is a traffic dashboard, not a product analytics tool.

Umami Cloud: 100K events a month free

Best for: one site that needs custom events and a clean dashboard without a server.

Umami's pricing page lists a Hobby plan at $0 with up to 100K events a month, 1 website and 6 months of data retention. Pro is $20 a month for 1 million events, up to 20 websites and 2 years of retention. The Umami site says it works without cookies and never collects personal data. The same code is open source, so you can move to self-hosting later (see below).

PostHog: 1M events a month, but cookies by default

Best for: SaaS apps that want web analytics plus funnels, session replay and feature flags in one place.

PostHog's pricing gives every account 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings and 1M feature flag requests a month, with no credit card. The free plan has 1 project and 1-year event retention, and usage stops at the free tier unless you add a card.

Out of the box, posthog-js stores state in localStorage and a first-party cookie named ph_<project_token>_posthog that lasts 365 days, according to the persistence docs. To drop the cookie, PostHog's cookieless tracking guide describes cookieless_mode: "always" (never stores anything in the browser) or "on_reject" (cookieless only after a visitor declines). You also have to turn on cookieless tracking in the project's web analytics settings. The cost: visitors are counted with a daily-salted server-side hash, so weekly and monthly unique users run high, identify() becomes a no-op, and GeoIP enrichment and bot detection are skipped.

GoatCounter: free for personal and small business sites

Best for: blogs and personal sites that want a minimal, donation-supported counter.

GoatCounter is free on goatcounter.com for "reasonable public usage": the site says personal sites and small-to-medium businesses are fine, but millions of pageviews a day are not. The script adds about 3.5KB, and there is also a no-JavaScript tracking pixel. It identifies visits without cookies: per its sessions doc, it keeps a hash-to-UUID mapping in memory for 8 hours and never writes the IP or User-Agent to disk. It counts visits, not raw pageviews, unless you change that in settings.

Vercel Web Analytics: 50K events on Hobby

Best for: projects already deployed on Vercel that only need pageviews.

Vercel's pricing doc includes 50,000 events a month on the Hobby plan, shared across all projects, with a one-month reporting window. Custom events are not included on Hobby. When you pass the limit, collection pauses after a three-day grace period; Hobby teams can't buy more. Pro pays $0.03 per 1K events. Vercel's privacy doc says visitors are identified by a hash of the incoming request, not cookies, and the session is discarded after 24 hours. It only works for sites hosted on Vercel.

Free to self-host

Self-hosting means the software is free and the server is not. You also handle backups, upgrades and uptime. If you need somewhere to run these, the Coolify alternatives post compares self-hosted deploy panels, and free uptime monitoring covers watching them.

Umami: MIT, Node and PostgreSQL

The Umami repo is MIT-licensed. It needs Node.js 18.18 or later and PostgreSQL 12.14 or later. The pricing page notes that a few features, such as email reports and the streaming API, are Cloud-only. MIT makes Umami the least restrictive license on this list.

Plausible Community Edition: AGPL-3.0

Plausible CE is free to self-host under AGPL-3.0; the tracker script is MIT. Install instructions live in the community-edition repo. Compared with Plausible Cloud, CE ships twice a year rather than several times a week, has basic bot filtering only (no data center IP exclusion), and leaves out funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the sites API. Hosted Plausible has no free plan: it is a 30-day trial with no card, then from $9 a month for up to 10k monthly pageviews on Starter.

GoatCounter: one binary, SQLite or PostgreSQL

The GoatCounter repo ships statically compiled binaries; the only dependency is storage, either an SQLite file (the default) or PostgreSQL for larger sites. Docker Compose files are provided for both. The license is a slightly modified EUPL 1.2, per the LICENSE file.

PostHog: MIT hobby deploy, officially unsupported

PostHog's self-host docs offer a Docker Compose deployment under MIT, installed with:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/posthog/posthog/HEAD/bin/deploy-hobby)"

PostHog calls it officially unsupported, recommends it only under roughly 300k events a month, and asks for a VM around 4 vCPU and 16GB RAM. For most small projects the hosted free tier is the easier choice.

Rybbit: AGPL-3.0, Docker and ClickHouse

Rybbit is AGPL-3.0 and lists "No cookies" among its features. Its self-hosting guide asks for a VPS with at least 2GB of RAM, Docker, and a domain with HTTPS. The hosted version has no free plan: pricing is a 7-day trial, then Standard from $13 a month billed annually (up to 5 sites) with session replays on Pro.

Paid-only, for comparison

• Fathom: cookieless, from $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews, 7-day trial with a card required. No self-host edition.
• Pirsch: from $6 a month for 10,000 pageviews, 30-day trial with no card. Self-hosting is listed under Enterprise only.

How to choose

• Free and nothing to run, pageviews only: Cloudflare Web Analytics, or Vercel Web Analytics if the site already lives on Vercel and stays under 50K events.
• Free hosted with custom events: Umami Cloud Hobby for one site; PostHog if you also want funnels, replay or feature flags and are willing to configure cookieless mode.
• Self-host with the fewest strings: Umami (MIT) or GoatCounter (single binary, SQLite). Plausible CE and Rybbit are AGPL-3.0, which matters if you modify and serve them.
• Many small sites: Cloudflare (10 unproxied, unlimited proxied) beats Umami Hobby's single site.
• Check data retention: 1 month (Vercel Hobby), 6 months (Cloudflare, Umami Hobby) and 1 year (PostHog free) are very different if you want year-over-year numbers.

FAQ

What is the best free Google Analytics alternative?

It depends on what you track. For pageviews and referrers with no setup cost, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free with no event cap. For custom events, Umami Cloud's Hobby plan (100K events a month) or PostHog's free tier (1M events a month) go further.

Plausible vs Umami vs Fathom?

All three say they use no cookies. Umami has a free hosted plan and an MIT self-host edition. Plausible has a free AGPL-3.0 Community Edition but no free hosted plan, from $9 a month. Fathom is hosted and paid only, from $15 a month.

Does PostHog need a cookie banner?

By default PostHog sets a first-party cookie, so treat it like any cookie-based tool. With cookieless_mode: "always" it stores nothing in the browser; "on_reject" is meant for sites that keep a banner and fall back to cookieless when visitors decline.

Is self-hosted analytics really free?

The software is, the server is not. Umami needs Node and PostgreSQL, Rybbit asks for at least 2GB of RAM, and PostHog's hobby deploy wants around 16GB. GoatCounter with SQLite is the lightest option here.

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Analytics is one item on the launch-day SEO checklist; once it is in place, where to launch your side project is the next step. More tools for shipping are in the developer tools directory.