Simple Website Analytics Tools for a Small Business, Actually Compared

Search for website analytics tools and you get twelve listicles that all recommend the same nine products in a slightly different order, usually with an affiliate link attached. This is not that. We install and maintain these on client sites, we pay for some of them, and below is what each one costs today, what it does well, and one plainly stated thing it cannot do. That last part includes our own tool, which comes last on the list on purpose.

Pick in thirty seconds

• I want free, today, five minutes of work. Cloudflare Web Analytics if your site is already behind Cloudflare, GoatCounter if it is not.
• I want to see why people leave, not just how many. Microsoft Clarity, free, and run it alongside whatever else you use.
• I want a dashboard I actually understand and I will pay for it. Plausible or Fathom. They are close enough that either is fine.
• I am technical and want to own the data. Umami self-hosted, or GoatCounter self-hosted.
• I need Google Ads and Search Console integration for a big account. Google Analytics 4, and accept the learning curve.

Microsoft Clarity

Free, permanently, with no traffic limit. Microsoft's own FAQ says Clarity is free forever, does not sample, and does not push you to a paid version. There is no paid version. That is unusual enough to be worth saying twice.

What it is genuinely good at is showing you behaviour rather than counts. Session recordings, heatmaps, and the automatic detection of rage clicks and dead clicks. If your contact page converts badly and you do not know why, an afternoon of watching recordings will usually tell you within twenty minutes. It also handles unlimited sites on one account.

GoatCounter

Open source, and the hosted version at goatcounter.com is offered free for what the author calls reasonable public usage. His words: running your personal website or a small-to-medium business on it is fine, sending millions of pageviews a day is not. Funded by donations. There are no paid plans published on the site at the moment, so ignore the third-party reviews quoting a price.

No cookies, no localStorage, nothing stored in the browser at all. To tell repeat visits apart it hashes the site, the IP and the user agent and holds that in memory for up to eight hours, then it is gone. The dashboard is one page, loads instantly, and shows pages, referrers, countries, browsers. That is the whole product and for a lot of small sites that is the whole requirement.

Cloudflare Web Analytics

Free on every Cloudflare plan including the free one. It sets nothing in the browser: no cookies, no localStorage, no sessionStorage, and the visitor's IP is discarded at the nearest Cloudflare datacenter rather than stored. If your domain is already behind Cloudflare, turning this on is about two clicks.

You do not have to proxy your site through Cloudflare to use it. There is a JavaScript beacon that works on any host, though without proxying you are capped at ten sites. Core Web Vitals come along for free, which is genuinely useful if page speed is on your list.

Plausible

At the time of writing, the Starter plan is $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews a month, Growth is $14 and Business is $19 at the same volume. Annual billing works out to ten times the monthly price, so two months free. At 100,000 pageviews a month it is $19, $29 and $39. There is no free tier, but there is a 30-day trial with no card required.

The whole product is one page. Visitors, sources, pages, countries, devices, goals, and that is deliberately it. No cookies, so no banner. It is open source and there is a self-hostable Community Edition if you would rather run it yourself. Data retention is 3 years on Starter and Growth, 5 on Business.

Fathom

At the time of writing the entry plan is $15 a month, or $150 a year, and that covers 100,000 pageviews across up to 50 sites. That site count is the standout number: if you run several domains, Fathom is dramatically cheaper than anything else here. 1,000,000 pageviews is $60 a month. No free tier, and the trial is 7 days.

No cookies, no consent popups required. The dashboard is a single readable page in the same spirit as Plausible. Data retention is forever while you remain a customer, which is the most generous retention policy on this list by a distance.

Umami

Two products under one name. Self-hosted Umami is free, MIT licensed, and unlimited, which makes it the best answer on this page for anyone comfortable running a database. Umami Cloud has a free Hobby plan at 100,000 events a month for one website with 6-month retention, then Pro at $20 a month for 1,000,000 events across up to 20 websites with 2-year retention, then Business at $200 a month with session replays and heatmaps included.

No cookies, no consent banner needed. The Cloud free tier is the only genuinely free hosted plan on this list that also gives you goals and a proper API, which makes it a strong first pick for a single site.

Google Analytics 4

Free, and the most capable tool on this page if you have the patience for it. Nothing else connects natively to Google Ads and Search Console, and nothing else exports raw event data to BigQuery on a free tier. If you are spending real money on Google Ads and someone competent is managing the account, GA4 is not optional.

The honest problem is that GA4 was designed for analysts at large companies. The vocabulary is not the vocabulary a business owner uses, the default reports answer questions nobody asked, and building a report that says something useful takes real study. Most owners we meet have it installed, have opened it twice, and quietly decided they are not smart enough for it. They are perfectly smart. It is just not built for them.

Venbit Analytics

Ours, listed last, and we will hold it to the same standard as everything above. Venbit Analytics is first-party analytics we built because our own clients kept asking the same question and none of the tools on this page answered it: did the marketing work. It is one script tag. No cookies, no cross-site identifiers, so no banner for it, and bots are excluded from the counts.

What it does that the rest of this list does not: every form submission and phone tap lands in a leads inbox stored outside the email path, so a mail delivery failure never loses one. It reads the ad platform off the click id in the landing URL and turns that into a plain did-the-ads-work verdict. Google rankings sit on the same screen as visits and leads. There are visitor journeys, friction signals for rage clicks, dead clicks and form errors, a heatmap, and a weekly wins feed. Web portal plus an iOS app with push alerts when a lead comes in.

The comparison table

What we would actually tell a client to do

Install two things, not one. Take a counting tool that keeps history, and pair it with Clarity for behaviour. Cloudflare Web Analytics plus Clarity costs nothing and covers both halves. If you want the counting half to hold more than six months of history and read a little better, that is where Plausible's $9 or Fathom's $15 earns its keep.

Do not install four. We have inherited sites carrying GA4, Clarity, Hotjar, a heatmap plugin and two abandoned tag manager containers, and the only measurable effect was a slower site. Every script you add costs load time, and load time costs you visitors.

And be honest with yourself about the real question. Most owners do not want analytics. They want to know whether the money they spent last month produced any phone calls. If that is your question, the number to watch is not visits, it is leads per hundred visits, and almost none of these tools will hand you that without you doing the arithmetic yourself. Deciding what you are measuring for is worth more than the choice of tool.

One related question that comes up every time: none of the cookieless options here need a consent banner, and most local US businesses do not need one anyway. We went through the actual thresholds in do you need a cookie banner on a small business website. If your site needs someone to install and watch all this for you, that is part of our website maintenance plans, which start at $99 a month.