GA4 vs Plausible vs Umami vs Cloudflare vs Matomo: The Complete 2026 Web Analytics Comparison

As of August 2026, the moment you drop a single tracking script into your site, the real decisions begin. “Why not just use Google Analytics” is still a reasonable instinct, but if a meaningful share of your visitors are in Europe, cookie-consent banners quickly become a headache, and if your team wants to keep full ownership of its data through self-hosting, handing everything over to a vendor’s servers feels like a real cost. This web analytics comparison lines up all five major players — GA4, Plausible, Umami, Cloudflare Web Analytics, and Matomo — on pricing, tracking-script size, cookie policy, and the latest updates, using only facts drawn from official sources and cross-checked across multiple references.

Starting with the market landscape: by technology-adoption tracking (BuiltWith, 6sense, and similar), GA4 still commands a dominant 61-72% share, with the Facebook Pixel a distant second at 9-13% — though that’s ad tracking, a different category from pure web analytics. Among independent open-source and self-hosted tools, Matomo holds the top spot at roughly 2-3.6%, while Plausible, Umami, and Cloudflare Web Analytics belong to a cookieless camp that has grown fast enough recently that no reliably sourced individual market-share figures exist yet. Multiple sources repeat the claim that demand for cookieless analytics has grown since Chrome finished phasing out third-party cookies in 2025, but this article doesn’t cite a specific growth number, since none checks out.

Three axes keep coming up in actual purchasing decisions: first, whether you need cookie/GDPR handling and a consent banner at all; second, whether self-hosting is possible and who owns the data; third, tracking-script size (which affects page speed and Core Web Vitals) and pricing structure. That said, Matomo’s, Umami’s, and Cloudflare’s own documentation all flag the same misconception: going cookieless does not mean you’re automatically GDPR-compliant. Skipping cookies only gets you out of the ePrivacy consent-banner requirement — the underlying processing of personal data is still subject to GDPR.

This article covers everything from a full comparison table to a feature deep-dive on each product, a script-size benchmark, a complete pricing breakdown, recommendations by user type, practical tips, and an FAQ. If you’re already running on Cloudflare or one of the other five major web hosting & PaaS platforms, or starting a new project with a Next.js, React, Vue, Astro, or Svelte framework, this is written so you can settle on an analytics tool in the same pass. Anywhere a number couldn’t be verified, we’ve labeled it “estimate” or “sources disagree” rather than guessing.

1. Executive Summary: The Web Analytics Comparison at a Glance

For developers and marketers short on time, here’s the core information on all five tools compressed into one table. Skim this alone and you’ll have the big picture of this web analytics comparison.

📊 Web Analytics Tools: Full Comparison Table

The two rows worth reading first are “Cookie use” and “Free self-hosted edition.” GA4 is the only one of the five that uses cookies by default and has no free self-hosted edition — a design philosophy that sets it apart from the other four. Conversely, only GA4, Umami, and Cloudflare offer a free cloud tier; Plausible and Matomo Cloud have no permanent free option, which is easy to miss when you’re budgeting.

2. Feature Deep-Dive: The Five Major Web Analytics Tools

🔵 1) GA4 — The Free Standard, Still the Default Choice

• Version and positioning: “GA4” is itself the current product name. Since it officially replaced Universal Analytics in 2020, there’s been no separate major-version numbering scheme, and as of August 2026 there’s no confirmed announcement of a successor product like “GA5.”
• Free property limits: up to 50 event-scoped custom dimensions, 25 user-scoped custom dimensions, 50 event-scoped custom metrics, 30 key events (conversions), and 25 parameters per event — all free. Multiple sources agree that the free BigQuery link caps out at 1 million events per day, though this hasn’t been directly re-confirmed against official documentation, and free Exploration queries process up to 10 million events per query.
• The “500 event names” debate: official documentation indicates the 500-event-name limit applies only to app data streams, and that web data streams have no cap on the number of distinct event names. That said, a lot of SEO blogs lump the limit in as if it applies to web too, so sources genuinely disagree here — check the official docs yourself for a definitive answer.
• Script size: reported gtag.js sizes vary wildly across sources — 45KB, 54KB, 90KB, 134KB (gzipped) — so there’s no single figure to confirm. What every source does agree on is the direction: GA4 is dramatically heavier than the cookieless competition (Plausible at 1-2.5KB, Umami at ~2KB).
• Changes in the last six months: multiple sources describe the combination of Consent Mode v2 and server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) as the “standard” 2026 setup. TCF v2.3 has also replaced v2.2 — publishers and CMP vendors had until February 28, 2026 to migrate, and Google began accepting v2.3 back in October 2025. GTM also gained a “Set consent mode override” option that lets you force consent defaults to “denied” by region.

🟢 2) Plausible Analytics — The Cookieless Standard-Bearer

• Version structure: split between the hosted SaaS (Plausible Analytics) and the open-source, self-hosted “Plausible Community Edition (CE).” CE is AGPLv3, but the front-end tracking script alone is licensed separately under MIT, sidestepping AGPL’s copyleft-propagation concerns.
• Pricing structure: there’s no permanent free cloud tier — just a 30-day trial that doesn’t require a card. Checking the official site directly as of August 2026 shows a four-tier lineup: Starter ($9/month), Growth ($14/month), Business ($19/month), and Enterprise (custom quote) — Starter, Growth, and Business are all quoted at the same up-to-10,000-pageviews baseline, with prices sliding upward as traffic grows. Older write-ups that cite “Growth at $9/month” are actually describing what’s now the separate, cheaper Starter tier — don’t confuse that figure with the real Growth entry price of $14/month. Business is said to add funnels, e-commerce revenue tracking, and API access (though sources disagree on Business’s exact pageview threshold — some say 10,000, others 100,000, so this article doesn’t pin it down). Enterprise covers traffic above 10 million pageviews/month at a custom quote, and the overall price range slides from Starter’s $9/month up past $149/month depending on traffic. Self-hosted CE is entirely free with no license fee, and many sources say a $5-24/month VPS is plenty to run it.
• Script and privacy: the tracking script runs between under 1KB and 2.5KB depending on which options you enable. Plausible’s own site claims it uses no cookies, collects no personally identifying information, and does no user profiling. Every paid plan gets identical features — tiers differ purely by traffic volume, a much simpler structure than GA4 or Matomo.
• New in the last six months: April 2026 brought “Strict Funnels,” which only counts a conversion when every step happens in exact sequence. May 2026 added “User Journeys,” letting you trace visitors’ actual paths from either their entry point or their exit point.

🟣 3) Umami — A Lightweight Open-Source Option With Built-In Heatmaps

• Latest version: per GitHub Releases, v3.2.0 (released June 24, 2026) is current. A separate v2 documentation site still exists, which suggests the major version bumped from v2 to v3. v3.2.0’s headline additions are heatmaps (click and scroll), improved session replay, richer property reports, and improved revenue reporting.
• Cloud pricing: the free Hobby plan gives you 100,000 events/month, 1 site, and 6 months of data retention, permanently free. Pro is $20/month, including 1 million events, with up to 20 sites, 2 years of retention, and overage billed at $0.00003 per event. Business runs $200/month, including 10 million events, unlimited sites, 5 years of retention, and overage billed at $0.00002 per event (older write-ups claiming “Pro gets unlimited sites and 5-year retention” appear to have mixed up Pro’s numbers with the higher Business tier’s specs). Enterprise is custom-quoted.
• Self-hosting: MIT-licensed, completely free with no license fee — you only pay for your own infrastructure.
• Privacy versus features, in tension: the script weighs in around 2KB, drastically lighter than GA4. Umami officially claims no cookies, no fingerprinting, no personal-data collection, and self-asserted GDPR/CCPA/PECR compliance. But newer opt-in features like session replay log a lot more data by nature, and the community (in a GitHub Discussion) has made the practical point that you need to keep those features switched off if you want to hold onto a genuine “zero personal data” stance. Sources also disagree on whether funnels, cohort retention, and user-journey visualization are included on every cloud tier or gated behind Pro, so this article doesn’t take a position.
• Recent changes: v3.2.0 introduced heatmaps for the first time (June 2026) — a rare thing among self-hosted, open-source analytics tools, most of which don’t build heatmaps in at all.

🟠 4) Cloudflare Web Analytics — A Free Option You Can Flip On Instantly

• What it is: no separate version numbering, just the product name “Cloudflare Web Analytics”; the client-side script file is called beacon.min.js. You don’t need to change your DNS or route traffic through Cloudflare’s proxy — dropping in the JS snippet is enough to start using it.
• Pricing: official docs state plainly, “Available on all plans” — it’s bundled into every tier, including the free plan, with no separate charge. If you’re already running a static site on Cloudflare’s infrastructure, this is an option you can turn on at zero additional cost.
• Script and limitations: the script is 4.31KB gzipped, 10.27KB uncompressed. Because it stores no client-side state at all — no cookies, no localStorage — most interpretations hold that the ePrivacy directive’s cookie-consent-banner requirement simply doesn’t apply (the official explanation notes that IP addresses are used only momentarily for country-level geolocation and aren’t stored). The feature set, though, is minimal by design — reports cap out at the top 15 entries, and real-time reporting, UTM campaign analysis, funnels, revenue tracking, and custom event tracking aren’t available on any plan, free or paid. The collection pipeline itself does capture every event, but the official FAQ notes that once data has been stored for 7 days, historical records get aggregated and compressed down to roughly 10%.
• Changes in the last six months: on April 30, 2026, Navigation Type filtering and reporting was added, letting you distinguish between navigation types — link clicks, form submissions, page reloads, back/forward — and whether a request was served from the browser cache. On June 10, 2026, account-wide dashboard stability improved, fixing timeout and error issues on large accounts with 100+ sites and extending account-view loading support up to 1,000 sites. In May 2026, the /cdn-cgi/rum beacon endpoint changed to return a 405 instead of a 404 for anything other than a POST request.

🔴 5) Matomo — Data Sovereignty, Now With AI-Crawler Tracking

• Latest version: Matomo 5.12.0 (released July 14, 2026) is current. Preceding releases were 5.11.0 (June 8, 2026), 5.10.0 (May 3, 2026), and 5.9.0 (April 29, 2026).
• On-premise pricing structure: the core software, Community Edition, is GPL-licensed and completely free with no limit on users or hits. The bundled paid tiers run Team (€275/month, ~€230/month billed annually, up to 4 users, 5 million hits/month), Business (€1,450/month, €1,209 annually, up to 20 users, 30 million hits/month), Enterprise (€3,400/month, €2,834 annually, up to 50 users, 100 million hits/month), and VIP (custom quote, for 50+ users or 100 million+ hits/month). Individual paid plugins on the marketplace range from €22-€549/year — for example, heatmaps run €199/year, session recording €149/year, and A/B testing €249/year.
• Cloud (SaaS) pricing: some sources describe a Starter tier covering 50,000 hits/month (pageviews plus events) across up to 30 websites, but the exact euro price (some search results cite “€29/month”) hasn’t been re-confirmed via an official fetch, so this article doesn’t state it as fact. Tiers reportedly step up through Growth, Professional, Business, and Enterprise, handling roughly 100,000 / 300,000 / 600,000 / 1 million+ hits respectively.
• The legal basis for running cookieless: meeting the CNIL’s (France’s data-protection authority) March 2022 guidelines lets you operate without a consent banner. The conditions: mask at least 2 bytes of the IP address, disable cross-site tracking, ban commercial reuse of the data, prohibit sharing with third parties, cap visitor-cookie retention at 13 months and aggregated-report retention at 25 months, and offer an opt-out mechanism. Meeting these can reportedly earn a cookie-consent exemption in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere — though the actual legal determination can vary by jurisdiction and circumstance.
• Changes in the last six months — AI-crawler tracking: 5.12.0 (2026-07-14) introduced the “AI Chatbots Content Requests” report, which tracks how often AI chatbots like ChatGPT pull which pages or documents from your site, along with broken pages, server response times, and a “Discrepancy Score” comparing which pages AI versus human visitors prefer. The same release added an “AI Chatbots Real-time” report for live monitoring. 5.11.0 focused on security, reporting, and dashboard/widget-management improvements; 5.10.0 shipped a new UI theme with dark-mode support; and 5.9.0 improved security, reporting, and privacy while adding one-click CNIL-compliance setup and a dedicated segment-management page.

3. Tracking-Script Size: The Benchmark Showdown

Tracking-script size is the one factor with a direct effect on page-load speed and Core Web Vitals. It’s also where this web analytics comparison shows the most practical, real-world differences.

[Tracking-script size ranking — lightest first, confirmed ranges only]
Plausible          : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Under 1KB to 2.5KB (upper end with optional expanded script)
Umami              : ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ~2KB
Cloudflare WA      : ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ 4.31KB gzipped / 10.27KB uncompressed
Matomo             : ⭐⭐⭐☆☆ No official figure confirmed (varies by on-prem setup)
GA4                : ⭐⭐☆☆☆ Sources disagree (45-134KB, unconfirmed)

Looking purely at the numbers, every source agrees on the direction: Plausible and Umami are dozens of times lighter than GA4. Exactly how many times, though, can’t be pinned down, since GA4’s own figures range anywhere from 45KB to 134KB. One comparison worth noting puts GA4 at 19.01KB gzipped next to Cloudflare’s 4.31KB gzipped — but given how much GA4’s numbers vary elsewhere, it’s safest to treat that one as a reference point rather than gospel.

In practice, what matters isn’t the raw number but what that weight buys you. GA4 is heavy because it’s a full-blown analytics platform covering custom events, conversions, audiences, and Google Ads integration; Plausible, Umami, and Cloudflare Web Analytics are small because they were designed from the ground up as lightweight dashboards. Matomo’s script size swings widely depending on your on-prem setup and which plugins you’ve enabled, which is exactly why there’s no single official figure for it — worth flagging as part of this web analytics comparison.

4. Pricing Plans: The Complete Comparison

[Ranked by minimum monthly cost — entry-level paid pricing]
Cloudflare WA         : $0/mo    (bundled on every plan, permanently free)
GA4 (standard)        : $0/mo    (standard free tier)
Umami Hobby           : $0/mo    (100K events/month, 1 site)
Plausible Starter     : $9/mo    (10,000 pageviews/month)
Plausible Growth      : $14/mo   (10,000 pageviews/month)
Umami Pro             : $20/mo   (1M events/month)
Matomo Cloud          : Unconfirmed (~€29/mo estimated, unverified)
Matomo Team (on-prem) : €275/mo  (~€230/mo billed annually)
GA4 360               : Custom quote (market estimate from $12,500/mo, not officially disclosed)

💰 Pricing Plans in Detail

There are three “real costs” the price table alone doesn’t show. First: nobody can officially confirm GA4 360’s actual price. The “$12,500/month (roughly $150,000/year)” figure that keeps circulating in market research shows up across multiple sources, but it’s an industry estimate that no official Google primary source confirms — and some older write-ups may even be conflating it with legacy Universal Analytics 360 pricing. Real contracts get negotiated individually based on event volume and account structure, so it’s safest not to lock in a budget until you’ve actually gotten a quote.

Second: Matomo on-prem is free for the software itself, but infrastructure and plugin costs are extra. Community Edition is GPL-licensed and entirely free, but popular add-ons like heatmaps (€199/year), session recording (€149/year), and A/B testing (€249/year) have to be bought separately from the marketplace. Add on-prem infrastructure costs on top of that (not an official figure, just a reference point), and estimates suggest a VPS running $12-25/month at around 100,000 pageviews/month, climbing to $40-150/month as traffic grows.

Third: none of the five products publishes official pricing in Korean won (KRW) — relevant if you’re budgeting for a Korean-market deployment. If you do need a won conversion, the reference exchange rate as of August 2, 2026 was roughly ₩1,440/USD (with some sources noting the won had strengthened over the preceding month), and any conversion should carry an “approximately” caveat — this is a reference rate at the time of writing, not a live exchange rate. Plausible’s Starter plan at $9/month works out to roughly ₩13,000, for instance, its Growth plan at $14/month to roughly ₩20,000, and Umami Pro’s $20/month to roughly ₩29,000 — though the actual amount will depend on the exchange rate and card-network fees at the moment of payment.

5. Final Recommendations by User Type

🎯 1) Solo Bloggers and Small Businesses Starting on a $0 Budget

• Best pick: GA4 or Cloudflare Web Analytics
• Why: Both are permanently free. GA4 makes sense when you need full-blown analytics covering conversions, audiences, and ad integration; Cloudflare Web Analytics fits if you just want a lightweight look at visitor counts with zero setup. It’s especially convenient if you’re already on Cloudflare’s infrastructure — you can turn it on without a separate account.

🎯 2) Startups With European Visitors Trying to Avoid a Cookie-Consent Banner

• Best pick: Plausible or Matomo (if you meet CNIL’s conditions)
• Why: Plausible is cookieless by design from the start — no extra conditions to meet. Matomo can earn a consent-banner exemption in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere if you meet the CNIL’s March 2022 guidelines (2-byte IP masking, disabling cross-site tracking, and so on). Either way, going cookieless doesn’t mean you’re fully GDPR-compliant, so you still need to document your privacy policy separately.

🎯 3) Developers and Technical Teams Who Want 100% Data Ownership

• Best pick: self-hosted Umami or Matomo Community Edition
• Why: Umami is MIT-licensed, so self-hosting is completely free — you only pay for infrastructure. Matomo Community Edition is GPL-licensed with no cap on users or hits, and larger organizations can layer on support and extra features through a paid bundle (Team, from €275/month).

🎯 4) Content/Media Teams That Want to Track AI Chatbot Traffic

• Best pick: Matomo 5.12.0 or later
• Why: 5.12.0, released in July 2026, is the only tool among these five that natively tracks how much AI chatbots are pulling from your pages, via its “AI Chatbots Content Requests” and “AI Chatbots Real-time” reports, right down to a discrepancy score comparing what humans versus AI prefer.

🎯 5) Product Teams Who Want Heatmaps and Session Replay, Open Source

• Best pick: Umami v3.2.0
• Why: v3.2.0, released in June 2026, added heatmaps (click and scroll) plus improved session replay — an uncommon combination among self-hosted open-source tools. That said, if you want to preserve a genuine “zero personal data” stance, it’s more practical to leave session replay switched off by default.

🎯 6) Large Enterprises That Need Data-Warehouse Integration Like BigQuery

• Best pick: GA4 (upgrading to 360 if needed)
• Why: With free BigQuery integration, native connections to Google Ads and Search Console, and a dominant market share (61-72%), GA4 remains the standard. If you need higher event volume or an SLA, a quote-based 360 upgrade is worth considering.

6. Practical Tips and Common Mistakes

✅ Tip 1: Don’t Mistake “No Cookies” for “Fully GDPR-Compliant”

Plausible, Umami, Cloudflare Web Analytics, and Matomo’s cookieless mode all share one thing: no cookies. But the underlying processing of personal data is still governed by GDPR. Spelling out exactly what data you collect and how you retain it in your privacy policy is mandatory work, entirely separate from whether or not you use cookies.

✅ Tip 2: Plan Around GA4’s 25-Parameter-Per-Event Limit From the Start

Each event allows a maximum of 25 parameters. For e-commerce events that tend to need a lot of them, it’s far more efficient to plan ahead — decide which parameters must stay on the event itself and which should move to custom dimensions (up to 50, event-scoped) — before you go live, rather than re-plumbing your data model later.

✅ Tip 3: Turning On Umami’s Session Replay Undermines Its “Zero Personal Data” Stance

Umami officially claims no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no personal-data collection, but opt-in features like session replay by nature record much more user behavior data. If you want to keep a genuinely privacy-first stance, the recommended approach is to leave opt-in features like this off by default and switch them on selectively, only when you actually need them.

✅ Tip 4: To Drop the Cookie Banner With Matomo, Check Every CNIL Condition

Qualifying for the CNIL guideline exemption requires meeting every single condition: masking at least 2 bytes of the IP address, disabling cross-site tracking, banning commercial reuse of the data, prohibiting third-party sharing, capping visitor-cookie retention at 13 months and aggregated-report retention at 25 months, and providing an opt-out mechanism. Miss even one and the exemption is hard to claim, so it’s safest to work through each item in the settings screen like a checklist. The one-click CNIL-compliance setup available since 5.9.0 helps cut down on manual mistakes.

✅ Tip 5: Don’t Misread Cloudflare Web Analytics’ “10% Sampling”

Cloudflare’s collection pipeline captures every single event. But according to the official FAQ, once data has aged past 7 days, it gets aggregated and compressed down to around 10% — so keep in mind there’s a precision gap when comparing data from the last week against anything older. And because it simply has no real-time reporting, UTM campaign analysis, funnels, or revenue tracking, you’ll need to run a second tool alongside it from the start if you need any of those.

✅ Tip 6: Verify Script Size Yourself, Directly

GA4 and Matomo’s script sizes vary so much across sources that no single official number is fully trustworthy. The most accurate way to find out how heavy the script actually is on your own site is to check the Network tab in your browser’s dev tools directly. If your site is sensitive to Core Web Vitals, it’s worth re-evaluating your tool choice based on that real measurement rather than any published figure.

7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What should I check first in a web analytics comparison?

Nail down three things first: whether you serve a market that requires cookie/GDPR handling (like Europe), whether you want data sovereignty through self-hosting, and what your budget is. Once those three are settled, the field of GA4, Plausible, Umami, Cloudflare Web Analytics, and Matomo narrows down to one or two candidates.

Q. Is GA4 completely free?

Standard GA4 is free for most small and midsize sites. The enterprise-grade Analytics 360, though, has no published list price — it’s a custom quote, and while market estimates put it around $12,500/month, that’s not an officially confirmed figure.

Q. If I don’t use cookies, can I get rid of the consent banner entirely?

Going cookieless only gets you out of the ePrivacy directive’s consent-banner requirement — it doesn’t exempt you from GDPR’s rules on processing personal data. With Matomo, you’d need to meet all of the CNIL’s guideline conditions (IP masking, retention caps, and so on) to qualify for the exemption, and the actual legal outcome can still vary by jurisdiction and circumstance.

Q. Is Umami v3.2.0’s heatmap feature free to use?

v3.2.0 (released June 24, 2026) introduced heatmaps for the first time, but sources disagree on whether the feature is included on the free Hobby tier or gated behind Pro and above. If you self-host, it’s open source, so there’s no license fee to worry about either way.

Q. Should I choose Matomo on-premise or Matomo Cloud?

If you want to keep your data entirely on your own servers, on-premise Community Edition (GPL, completely free) is the right call. If you’d rather skip server management and start right away, go with Cloud — but since Cloud Starter’s exact euro price hasn’t been re-confirmed from official sources (estimated at ~€29/month), it’s worth checking the current price on Matomo’s official page before signing up.

Q. Can Cloudflare Web Analytics track conversions or revenue?

No. Cloudflare Web Analytics only gives you basic metrics — pageviews, visitors, referrers, country, browser, OS — and has no real-time reporting, UTM campaign analysis, funnels, revenue tracking, or custom event tracking. If you need any of those, you’ll want to pick GA4, Plausible, Umami, or Matomo instead.

Q. Why doesn’t Plausible have a permanent free plan?

Plausible runs its hosted SaaS purely on a paid-subscription model, offering only a 30-day free trial that doesn’t require a card. If you want it completely free, you can install the open-source, self-hosted Community Edition (CE) on your own VPS instead — no license fee, though most sources put the infrastructure cost at around $5-24/month.

Q. Can I mix and match these five tools?

That’s actually a common setup. For example, the marketing team tracks ad integration and conversions through GA4, the engineering team self-hosts Umami or Matomo for an internal dashboard that preserves data sovereignty, and static landing pages get a lightweight Cloudflare Web Analytics snippet. If you also want to widen your view of content-acquisition channels to include AI search, our AI search engine comparison covering Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, and more is worth a look too.

8. Conclusion: The Practical Takeaway From This 2026 Web Analytics Comparison

As of August 2026, this web analytics comparison arrives at a clear conclusion: there’s no single right answer. What matters is picking the combination that fits your situation across three axes — cookie/GDPR handling, self-hosting and data ownership, and script size versus price. GA4 remains the default thanks to its dominant market share and free, comprehensive analytics, but its cookie-based tracking and comparatively heavy script are real liabilities in privacy-first markets.

In practice, a diversified strategy is the realistic path: run GA4 as your baseline, layer on Plausible or Matomo for cookieless compliance if you serve a lot of European visitors, self-host Umami or Matomo Community Edition where data sovereignty matters, and add a lightweight Cloudflare Web Analytics snippet if you’re already running a static site on Cloudflare’s infrastructure. If you need something no other tool has caught up on yet, like AI-chatbot traffic tracking, Matomo 5.12.0 or later is worth a serious look. If you’re also reconsidering your deployment infrastructure, our Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Render, and Fly.io hosting comparison can help, and if you’re weighing frameworks at the same time, our Next.js, React, Vue, Astro, and Svelte comparison covers that ground.

[Summary: the final recommendation for your situation]

$0 budget, starting right now
  → GA4 (full analytics) or Cloudflare Web Analytics (lightweight visitor stats)

Lots of European visitors, want to skip the cookie banner
  → Plausible (Starter from $9/mo) or Matomo (if you meet CNIL conditions)

100% data ownership, want to self-host
  → Umami (MIT, completely free) or Matomo Community Edition (GPL, completely free)

Heatmaps and session replay, open source
  → Umami v3.2.0 (2026-06-24, heatmaps newly introduced)

Need to track AI chatbot traffic too
  → Matomo 5.12.0 (AI Chatbots Content Requests / Real-time reports)

Enterprise, BigQuery / Google Ads integration required
  → GA4 (contact for a 360 quote if needed)

For any figure this web analytics comparison couldn’t confirm — GA4 360’s exact price, each tool’s precise script size, Plausible Business’s pageview threshold, Matomo Cloud’s entry price, and so on — double-check it on the product’s official page before you sign up.