Self-hosted analytics is unusual in this directory because the motivation is not primarily cost.
Updated 2026-10-03 · 4 options compared
The short answer
Plausible if you want a legal, cookie-free analytics setup with the least possible effort. Umami if you want the same result with no licensing considerations at all. Matomo only if you need the depth of a full web-analytics suite and will accept the operational weight.
Self-hosted analytics is unusual in this directory because the motivation is not primarily cost. Google Analytics is free. The reason people move is that it has been ruled non-compliant by several European data protection authorities, it feeds an advertising business, and the cookie banner it legally requires degrades both the visitor experience and the accuracy of the numbers you were trying to read. What follows are the tools that measure without any of that.
| # | Tool | License | Setup | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Plausible Analytics | AGPL-3.0 | Intermediate | A normal website that wants legal, readable traffic numbers. |
| 2 | Umami | MIT | Beginner | The same job as Plausible with no licensing questions. |
| 3 | Matomo | GPL-3.0 | Intermediate | Deep web analytics, especially where you need segmentation and funnels. |
| 4 | Grafana | AGPL-3.0 | Intermediate | Visualising infrastructure metrics and application performance. |
The split is between measuring a *website* and measuring a *product*. If your question is which pages people read and where they came from, Plausible and Umami answer it in a dashboard you can read in ten seconds, with no cookies and therefore no consent banner — which is both a legal simplification and a genuine UX improvement. If your question is about funnels, retention cohorts, and user-level behaviour across sessions, you need something closer to Matomo, and you should budget real resources for it.
Best for: A normal website that wants legal, readable traffic numbers.
The best ratio of insight to effort here. One small cookieless script, a clean dashboard that answers the questions most site owners actually have, goals and funnels, and no consent banner required. It is the tool that made "self-hosted analytics" a normal thing to do, and it remains the easiest to recommend.
Replaces: Google Analytics, Umami, Fathom Analytics
Best for: The same job as Plausible with no licensing questions.
Effectively the same product with an MIT licence and one less thing to think about. It is lighter to run, entirely free of licensing considerations, and covers the standard reports. If Plausible's licence terms give you pause, this is the drop-in answer.
Replaces: Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom Analytics
Best for: Deep web analytics, especially where you need segmentation and funnels.
The full power tool, and the only option here that approaches Google Analytics for depth: funnels, heatmaps, session recordings, segmented reports, e-commerce tracking, and a plugin ecosystem. It is also the heaviest — a real PHP application with a database that grows with traffic — so it is a considered choice rather than a default.
Replaces: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Plausible
Best for: Visualising infrastructure metrics and application performance.
Not a web analytics tool, but the answer once your questions move from "how many visitors" to "how is the system behaving". It visualises anything you can get into a time-series database, which is why self-hosters end up with it for infrastructure metrics and application dashboards regardless of which web tracker they chose.
Replaces: Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud