11 free web analytics tools in 2026: what each free plan includes

Eleven web analytics tools have a free plan worth using as of November 2026: Google Analytics 4, Cloudflare Web Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and Simple Analytics have no traffic cap, PostHog and Mixpanel are free up to 1 million events a month, Umami Cloud, Vercel and invisit, the tool we build, have smaller allowances, and Plausible and Matomo are free to run on your own server. What each plan leaves out decides the pick: GA4 and Clarity set cookies that need consent in the EU and UK, Cloudflare keeps six months of data, Vercel’s free plan excludes commercial sites, and self-hosting costs a server and your time.

The best free option by situation:

• Page views, referrers and Core Web Vitals with no traffic cap: Cloudflare Web Analytics.
• No visitor identifier of any kind, page views only: Simple Analytics Free.
• The most depth for nothing at any volume, or Google Ads: Google Analytics 4, behind a consent banner in the EU and UK.
• Session recordings and heatmaps: Microsoft Clarity, next to a traffic tool.
• Cookieless events and funnels on one site, up to 100,000 events: Umami Cloud Hobby.
• Cookieless funnels, heatmaps, web vitals and AI referrals on up to 4 small sites, with data kept forever: invisit Free.
• A non-commercial project hosted on Vercel: Vercel Web Analytics Hobby.
• Product analytics up to 1 million events: PostHog for replay, flags and experiments; Mixpanel for retention of signed-in users.
• Free on your own server: Plausible Community Edition for a simple dashboard, Matomo On-Premise for GA4-level depth.

We checked every limit below on the vendors’ own pricing pages, docs and terms on November 3, 2026, and measured each script with gzip -9 as in our script size test.

Free web analytics plans compared

The eleven free plans fall into three groups: free at any volume (Google Analytics 4, Cloudflare, Clarity and Simple Analytics), free up to a monthly cap (from invisit’s 20,000 events to PostHog’s and Mixpanel’s 1 million), and free software you run yourself (Plausible Community Edition and Matomo On-Premise).

Volumes are in each vendor’s own unit. A page view is one event almost everywhere, but PostHog sends at least two events per page view by default, so its 1M events cover about 500,000 page views; Umami counts every stored event property as one more event; invisit counts its automatic outbound-link and download events. Vercel’s Hobby plan is the only free plan here that rules out commercial sites, and Clarity’s terms rule out sites aimed at under-18s and sensitive content.

1. Cloudflare Web Analytics: best free option if page views and page speed are all you need

Cloudflare Web Analytics is free with no traffic cap and needs only a Cloudflare account and one script tag; your DNS can stay where it is. It reports page views, visits, referrers, countries, devices and Core Web Vitals, and Cloudflare says it uses no cookies or localStorage and does not fingerprint visitors (product page).

The free plan’s real limits, from Cloudflare’s FAQ and limits page as of November 2026:

• Six months of history. Data is kept unsampled for 7 days, then aggregated down to around 10% of the original volume.
• No custom events and no UTM parameters, because Cloudflare does not log query strings.
• 10 sites per account for sites not proxied through Cloudflare; no limit for proxied sites.
• No unique visitors. A visit is a page view whose referrer is not your own hostname (metrics).
• Ad blockers block the beacon, which measured about 10 KB gzipped.

Cloudflare Web Analytics fits a personal site, documentation or a side project where traffic and page speed are the only numbers you read. You outgrow it the day you want a signup counted, a campaign tagged or this year compared with last, since no Cloudflare plan offers events, UTM reports or more than six months.

2. Simple Analytics Free: best free option if no visitor identifier is acceptable

Simple Analytics’ free plan counts page views on 5 sites for one user, with no cookies, no local storage and no hash of the IP address, as of November 2026 (pricing). The price is 30 days of history, a required Simple Analytics badge on your site, and no events, goals or APIs.

Because Simple Analytics keeps no identifier, it counts a visitor for every page view that arrives with no referrer or one from another site, so someone who comes twice in a day counts twice (unique visits). It is a Dutch company storing data in the Netherlands and Germany, and its script measured about 4.8 KB gzipped.

Simple Analytics lists no page view limit for the free plan, so a busy page-view-only site fits. You outgrow it in time rather than volume: 30 days rules out month-over-month comparisons, and the first event you want to count needs the Simple plan, $15 a month up to 20,000 page views and events. See Simple Analytics vs invisit.

3. Google Analytics 4: best free option if you buy Google Ads or want depth at any volume

Google Analytics 4 is free at any volume on standard properties (Google’s terms), with funnel, path and cohort explorations, audiences, Google Ads and Search Console links, and a free daily BigQuery export. No other hosted tool here gives that much depth free at any volume.

GA4’s free limits sit in the detail. The user- and event-level data behind explorations and funnel reports is deleted after 2 months by default and 14 months at most, while aggregated standard reports are kept (data retention). Explorations sample once a query covers more than 10 million events (sampling), and the BigQuery export stops at 1 million events a day, with storage and queries past BigQuery’s free sandbox billed by Google Cloud (BigQuery Export).

GA4 sets _ga cookies for two years (cookie list), and Google’s EU user consent policy requires consent for them where the law does, which in practice means a banner for EU, UK and Swiss visitors. gtag.js measured 155 to 179 KB gzipped, the heaviest script in this list.

Choose GA4 if you buy Google Ads, read Search Console queries beside landing pages, want raw events in BigQuery or measure apps. Few sites outgrow GA4 on volume; people leave for the banner, the learning curve or event-level history that expires. Analytics 360 raises the limits under a contract with no published price. See GA4 vs invisit.

4. Microsoft Clarity: best free option for session recordings and heatmaps

Microsoft Clarity records sessions and builds click, scroll and attention heatmaps for free, with no traffic limits, no limit on sites or team members, and no paid plan, according to Microsoft’s FAQ. Clarity keeps up to 100,000 recordings per project per day, against 5,000 a month on PostHog’s free tier and 10,000 on Mixpanel’s.

Clarity’s dashboard also counts sessions, page views and referrers, puts visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity into their own AI channels, records custom events with clarity("event", name) and builds funnels. With a CDN connected (Fastly, Amazon CloudFront or Cloudflare), it shows AI bot activity from server logs.

The limits of Microsoft Clarity’s free service, as of November 2026:

• Recordings are kept 30 days. After that Clarity keeps 1% of them, or 10 a day if that is more, for up to 9 months, and heatmap and click data is kept 9 months (data retention).
• Above 100,000 sessions a day, Clarity samples which recordings it keeps (client API), and one heatmap covers up to 100,000 page views (heatmaps).
• Clarity sets a first-party _clck cookie for 365 days and _clsk for 1 day (lifetimes read from clarity.js 0.8.75), plus Microsoft third-party cookies such as MUID (cookie list).
• Since October 31, 2025, Clarity enforces consent signals for visits from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. Without consent, each page view becomes its own session, so replays and journeys break for those visitors (consent mode).
• Clarity’s terms rule out sites aimed at people under 18 and use with health care, financial services or government-related content.

Clarity’s script measured about 27 KB gzipped, loader included. Choose Clarity to watch where visitors get stuck, next to a traffic tool you trust for counts. On price you never outgrow Microsoft Clarity; what can rule it out is how Microsoft uses the data, covered in the section on hidden costs below.

5. Umami Cloud Hobby: best free hosted plan for events and funnels on one site

Umami Cloud’s Hobby plan is free up to 100,000 events a month on 1 site, with 6 months of data, as of November 2026 (Umami pricing). Unlike most free tiers, Hobby includes custom events with properties, funnels, retention, user journeys, UTM reports, goals and attribution, and Umami’s terms state that nothing in them restricts commercial use.

Umami sets no cookies; it tells visitors apart with a hash whose salt rotates monthly by default (metric definitions). You pick an EU or US region at signup, and the script measured about 4 KB gzipped.

Umami Cloud Hobby’s limits: one site, no team members, no API or MCP access, no email reports and no revenue import from payment providers. Each stored event property counts as one more event, so umami.track('signup', { plan: 'pro' }) uses two of your 100,000. Heatmaps and session replays need Business, at $200 a month.

Choose Umami Cloud Hobby for one small site that needs events and funnels without a server. You outgrow it with a second site, a colleague or a question older than six months; Pro costs $20 a month for 1M events, 20 sites and 2 years of data. Umami is also MIT licensed and free to self-host on Node.js and PostgreSQL. See Umami vs invisit.

6. invisit Free: best free option for small sites that want nearly every feature and data kept forever

invisit, the tool we build, has a free plan of 20,000 events a month on 4 sites, with no card, no time limit and commercial use allowed. That is the smallest allowance in this list, but the plan has nearly every feature and keeps data forever (pricing).

invisit Free includes funnels, every visit step by step, click and scroll heatmaps, web vitals from real visitors, referrals from 19 AI assistants in their own tab (AI assistant traffic), traffic alerts, the REST API, the MCP server and unlimited team members. Crawler reads are recorded once @invisitdev/server runs on your server (crawler reads). Three things need a paid plan: the list of individual revenue transactions (Free shows revenue totals and charts), custom domains for short links, and a public dashboard without the invisit watermark.

invisit sets no cookies and stores nothing on the device. It tells visitors apart with a keyed hash of the site, the date, the device type and the IP address, mixed with a random salt generated for each UTC day and deleted about 25 hours after the day ends, so nobody is followed across days. Raw IP addresses are never stored, and data is kept in Falkenstein, Germany, with Cloudflare, a US company, in front for DNS and CDN.

invisit bills page views, custom events (the automatic outbound-link and download events included), conversions and short-link clicks; bots, crawler reads, web vitals and heatmap clicks are never billed. The first month over 20,000 is still recorded in full, and only a second month over in a row pauses new events at the limit (billing).

invisit Free’s limits: 20,000 events is about 650 page views a day, so a growing blog passes it quickly. There is no self-hosting, no session recordings and no retention cohorts, the core script is about 8.5 KB, and a free site with no events for about six months is deleted after two emails. The next step is Starter, $14 a month for 100,000 events.

Choose invisit Free for a few small sites, such as a product in its first months, where you want funnels, heatmaps and AI referrals without cookies, and want the history to stay when traffic grows.

7. Vercel Web Analytics Hobby: best free option for a personal project on Vercel

Vercel Web Analytics is free on the Hobby plan up to 50,000 events a month, but only for non-commercial personal projects deployed on Vercel. Vercel’s fair use guidelines count ads, selling a product or service, affiliate sites and paid client work as commercial.

The Hobby limits, from Vercel’s pricing as of November 2026: page views only, since custom events need Pro; a reporting window of 1 month; and once a team passes 50,000 events, a three-day grace period before Vercel stops collecting. Core Web Vitals come from Speed Insights, a separate product whose free tier shows only the Real Experience Score, for 10,000 events per team over a rolling 30 days (Speed Insights pricing).

Vercel Web Analytics sets no cookies, counting visitors with a hash of the request that resets daily, and its script measured about 2 KB gzipped. Collection runs through routes on your Vercel deployment, so the analytics stop if the site moves to another host.

Choose Vercel Web Analytics Hobby for a hobby project already on Vercel. You outgrow it the first time the site earns money: Pro costs $20 a month per deploying seat, plus $3 per 100,000 events. See Vercel Web Analytics vs invisit.

8. PostHog: best free option for product teams that want replay, flags and experiments

PostHog gives 1 million events a month free, plus 5,000 session recordings, on 1 project with a year of data, as of November 2026 (PostHog pricing). The free tier spans web and product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and surveys on one event stream, with unlimited team members.

PostHog counts every event, and a page view sends at least two by default ($pageview and $pageleave), before autocaptured clicks. So the free 1 million events cover about 500,000 page views. On the free plan, ingestion stops at the limit until the month resets, and data is kept 1 year, against 7 on paid plans (retention).

By default posthog-js sets a first-party cookie for 365 days and uses localStorage (persistence), and PostHog’s own GDPR guide says to use a cookie banner for logged-out visitors when you track with cookies. Cookieless mode needs settings in code and in the project, and keeps replay and surveys off for visitors without consent. The main script measured about 119 KB gzipped.

Choose PostHog for a product team that wants replay, flags and experiments on the same data as its traffic. You outgrow the free tier past about 500,000 page views a month, and 1M page views cost about $50 a month. A self-hosted MIT edition exists, but PostHog calls it unsupported. See PostHog vs invisit.

9. Mixpanel Free: best free option for retention and cohorts of signed-in users

Mixpanel’s Free plan covers 1 million events a month and 10,000 session replays, with unlimited seats, as of November 2026 (Mixpanel pricing). Mixpanel is product analytics built on user profiles: Insights, Funnels, Retention and Flows over events tied to the people who did them, across web and mobile apps.

Mixpanel Free’s limits: events count across all your projects, page views and autocaptured clicks included, and once a month passes 1 million events Mixpanel keeps collecting but pauses queries until you upgrade (billing). Saved cohorts, alerts, warehouse connectors and the Query API need Growth, and events are deleted after 2 years.

Mixpanel’s JavaScript SDK keeps a first-party cookie for 365 days by default, so EU and UK sites usually load it behind a banner. Data is stored in the US unless you create the project with EU residency, which cannot be changed later (EU residency). The SDK measured about 33 KB gzipped.

Choose Mixpanel when your question is which signed-in users came back in week four, not where today’s visitors came from. You outgrow Free past 1 million events; Growth costs $259 a month at 2 million on monthly billing. See Mixpanel vs invisit.

10. Plausible Community Edition: best free option if you self-host and want a simple dashboard

Plausible Community Edition is Plausible’s dashboard, free under AGPLv3 on your own server, with no fees to Plausible (self-hosted Plausible). It is cookieless: visitors are counted with a hash whose salt is deleted every 24 hours (data policy), and the script is about 2.5 KB.

What Plausible Community Edition leaves out, per Plausible: funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API. Bot filtering is basic (User-Agent and referrer spam only), releases come twice a year, and support comes from the community.

What it takes, per the Community Edition README: Docker and Docker Compose, a CPU with SSE 4.2 or NEON instructions for ClickHouse, and at least 2 GB of RAM. Upgrades, backups and security fixes are yours; Plausible points out that a fix it ships protects a self-hosted instance only once you apply the release.

Choose Plausible Community Edition if you already run servers and want a clean cookieless dashboard on your own hardware. You outgrow it when you need funnels or revenue, which are on Plausible’s hosted Business plan at $39 a month for 100,000 page views. See Plausible vs invisit.

11. Matomo On-Premise: best free option if you self-host and need Google Analytics depth

Matomo On-Premise is free under GPL v3 with unlimited hits on your own server, and it is the closest self-hosted match for GA4. The free edition covers the visits log, events, goals, ecommerce, segments, a tag manager, scheduled email reports, custom alerts, a Google Analytics importer and an MCP server (Matomo pricing).

The paid parts of Matomo On-Premise are premium plugins, billed yearly by number of users (marketplace). For 1 to 4 users, Funnels costs $239 a year, Heatmaps and Session Recording $269, A/B Testing $269 and Cohorts $99.

Matomo’s standard tracker sets first-party cookies, _pk_id for 13 months among them (cookie list). One line, _paq.push(['disableCookies']), turns them off, at the cost of less accurate unique visitor counts (going cookieless). The core matomo.js measured about 22 KB gzipped.

Matomo 5 needs PHP 8 and MySQL or MariaDB. Matomo’s sizing guide recommends at least 2 CPUs, 2 GB of RAM and a 50 GB SSD up to 100,000 page views a month, 4 CPUs, 8 GB and 250 GB up to 1 million, and two servers beyond that.

Choose Matomo On-Premise when policy requires self-hosting or you need GA-level reports without Google. The plugins you need decide the real price. See Matomo vs invisit.

What does free web analytics cost you?

Free analytics plans cost you in ways the price tag hides: a consent banner when the tool sets cookies, your visitors’ data used by the vendor when its terms say so, data lost at a cap, and the server and hours when you self-host.

Which free analytics tools need a cookie banner?

Five of the eleven set cookies by default: Google Analytics 4 (_ga, 2 years), Microsoft Clarity (_clck, 1 year, plus Microsoft’s own), PostHog (365 days), Mixpanel (365 days) and Matomo (_pk_id, 13 months, unless you turn cookies off). For EU and UK visitors they need consent, which means a banner, and the visitors who decline it go missing from your numbers.

Clarity’s terms say it outright: for individuals in the European Union, “you must obtain consent for your use of cookies or other local storage” (section 4.4(d)). The other six tools set no cookies, which helps but is not an automatic exemption everywhere. Our guide to cookie banners for analytics covers the EU, UK and US rules country by country.

Does the vendor use your visitors’ data?

Two of the free tools say in their own documents that the vendor uses the data. Microsoft Clarity’s terms of use make you and Microsoft independent controllers, and section 4.4(c)(iii) says Microsoft may use the personal data it collects “to provide the Offering; improve Microsoft’s products and services, including reporting and performance analysis; and create user profiles for purposes that include advertising.” The same terms require your privacy notice to say that Microsoft collects personal data from you to provide Microsoft Advertising.

Google Analytics 4 has a data sharing setting called Google products & services. When it is on, Google can use your Analytics data to improve Google products, including Google Ads tools, and is an independent controller of that data under the GDPR (data sharing settings). You choose it at signup and can turn it off in Admin.

Cloudflare takes the opposite line on its Web Analytics page: tracking visitors to retarget them with ads “is not Cloudflare’s model.”

What happens when you pass the free limit?

Some free plans stop collecting at the cap, so the data from the rest of the month is gone for good. Others keep collecting and lock something else:

What does self-hosting cost?

Self-hosted analytics is free software on a server you pay for and look after. Plausible recommends at least 2 GB of RAM, and Matomo 2 CPUs and 2 GB up to 100,000 page views a month. On Hetzner’s shared cloud servers, 1 vCPU with 2 GB cost €11.99 a month and 2 vCPUs with 4 GB €19.99, before VAT, when we checked on November 3, 2026.

The hours cost more than the server: installing, applying security releases, backing up the database and restoring a backup once to prove it works. At that price a hosted plan is often close: Umami Pro is $20 a month for 1 million events, and Plausible Starter is $9 a month for 10,000 page views.

Checklist before you pick a free plan

• Count a month of traffic in the vendor’s unit: two events per page view on PostHog, one more per stored property on Umami.
• Check what happens at the cap. Stopped collection loses data for good; paused queries do not.
• Match retention to the comparison you will want. Year over year needs 13 months; Cloudflare and Umami Hobby keep 6, Vercel Hobby 1, Simple Analytics Free 30 days.
• If the tool sets cookies and you have EU or UK visitors, plan for a banner and the visitors it loses.
• Read the data use section of the vendor’s terms before you sign up.
• Confirm commercial use is allowed. Vercel Hobby rules it out.

The trap to avoid is retention. A free plan that keeps 30 days or 6 months looks fine until the first time you want to compare this November with last November, and the data that would answer it is already gone. If you start on GA4, raise event data retention from the default 2 months to 14 months in Admin on the first day; Google applies the longer period only to data it still holds.