A Google Analytics Alternative For A Simple Site

You opened Google Analytics to answer one simple question, "how many people looked at the donate page last month?", and twenty minutes later you were still clicking through Explorations, Audiences and a setup wizard about key events.

That's the usual reason people go looking for a Google Analytics alternative. GA4 is free and does far more than a small site needs. It's built for businesses that buy ads and need to tie a click to a sale, and a small site pays for that with a cookie banner and a dashboard most small teams never open.

There are now half a dozen decent replacements, several of them free. They differ in four ways the pricing pages blur: price at your traffic, whether there's a script, how long your data is kept, and whether you can count a button click.

So this is the comparison for anyone who wants to replace Google Analytics on a small site, with prices checked on each vendor's own page in November 2026, plus my pick by situation and a step-by-step for a small nonprofit making the switch.

How the cookie-free counting itself works is covered in how cookieless analytics tells visitors apart. This post is about choosing a tool.

Why Small Sites Leave GA4

Small sites leave GA4 because it answers questions they don't ask, and makes the ones they do ask hard to find. The cookie banner and the ad blockers are the other two reasons.

Four specifics come up again and again:

• The banner. GA4 sets a _ga cookie that, by Google's own documentation, lasts two years by default. In the UK and EU that usually means asking consent first.
• Missing visitors. Ad blockers commonly block the GA script, and so do some browsers' privacy settings. Visitors who block it, or who decline the banner, simply don't appear.
• Retention. On a free property, the detailed event data you explore can be kept for 2 or 14 months, not longer. Standard reports aren't affected. Set it to 14 on day one if you stay. Google Analytics Help on data retention
• Complexity. Reports built around events, sessions and key events are powerful once configured. For "which pages got read", they're a lot of interface.

GA4 is good at what it was built for, tying ad spend to sales. That just isn't your job.

What Should A Google Analytics Alternative Do For You?

Whichever you pick, your Google Analytics alternative should answer your real questions on one screen, at a price that fits your traffic, without a banner. Before you compare tools, write your questions down.

These six questions decide which tool fits:

1. What do you actually look at? If it's views, top pages and where visitors came from, nearly anything works. If it's funnels, meaning how many people move from one page to the next step, you need a tool with events.
2. Do you need to count clicks? A "Donate" button that leads off-site, a download, a form start. Page-view counting can't see those; you need custom events.
3. Do you tag campaign links? If your newsletter links carry UTM tags (the ?utm_source= bit that says where a click came from), pick a tool that reads them.
4. How long must data last? Year-on-year comparisons need more than 12 months, or a habit of exporting.
5. Script or no script? A script can be blocked. Server-side counting can't, but it usually has no events.
6. Who should hold the data? A hosted service, or your own server if you're able to run one.

The Options Compared

Here are the realistic choices for a small site, with prices and limits as listed on each vendor's own pricing page when I rechecked on 13 November 2026. They change, so confirm before you commit.

Two things stand out once it's laid out like that.

First, "free and no banner" is a crowded corner: Cloudflare, Umami's Hobby plan, Simple Analytics' free plan and host-level stats all sit there. You don't have to pay to leave GA4.

Second, custom events are the real dividing line. If you need to count a button click, the host-level and Cloudflare options are out.

Which One I'd Pick, By Situation

My pick depends on one question: do you need to count anything other than page views? Here's how I'd decide.

You only want views, top pages and referrers. Use your host's built-in counting if it has one, or Cloudflare Web Analytics if it doesn't. Both are free, neither needs a banner for the counting itself, and there's nothing to maintain.

You want goals and campaign tags, and no bill. Umami's Hobby plan. One site, 100,000 events a month, and it reads UTM tags. Export the monthly totals, because six months of history goes quickly.

You'll pay for a dashboard people will actually open. Plausible if your traffic is small, since $9 covers 10,000 views. Fathom if you run several sites, since its entry plan covers 50 of them.

You're comfortable running a server. Self-host Umami or Plausible's Community Edition. Free software, your data, your upkeep.

You run Google Ads or a Google Ad Grant. Keep GA4, or at least Google's conversion tag. Google's own Ad Grants guidance recommends linking Analytics to Ads for conversion tracking, and none of the tools above send conversions to Google Ads the way GA4 does.

A Nonprofit Replacing GA4, Step By Step

Here's the switch for one realistic case. A volunteer-run community food bank has a small static site: a home page, "how to get help", "volunteer", "donate", and a monthly appeal page. GA4 was installed by a volunteer who's since moved on, and nobody can read it.

Their questions are short. How many people visit the "get help" page, did this month's appeal email send people to the donate page, and does anyone click the Donate button, which goes off to a payment provider.

1. List the reports anyone opened in the last three months. For them, it was one: page views per page. That alone ruled out paying for anything.
2. Spot the one thing page views can't see. The Donate button leaves the site, so counting it needs a custom event. That ruled out host-level counting and Cloudflare.
3. Pick Umami's free Hobby plan. One site, events included, UTM tags read.
4. Tag the appeal email's links. Use the same utm_source and utm_campaign every month, so months compare cleanly. A UTM link builder keeps the naming consistent.
5. Paste the new tag next to the old one and run both for 30 days. Expect the new tool to show more visitors, because some people blocked GA or declined its banner.
6. Remove the GA4 tag. Search every page for gtag and googletagmanager. A leftover copy on one page keeps the banner requirement alive.
7. Update the privacy notice and drop the banner, if nothing else on the site needed it.
8. Export monthly totals to a spreadsheet. Six months of history on the free plan isn't enough for the trustees' annual report.

If pasting a script into each page is new to you, how to link a JavaScript file to an HTML page covers where the tag goes.

What You Give Up When You Leave GA4

You give up the Google ecosystem, mostly. That's fine for most small sites, but know it before you delete the tag.

Gone: the link to Google Ads, conversion imports, demographic reports, audience building for ads, and the free BigQuery export. If none of those meant anything to you before reading this sentence, you won't miss them.

Not gone: Google Search Console. It's a separate, free tool that shows which searches your site appears for and how often people click, and it doesn't depend on any analytics tag. Keep it whatever you choose. Google Search Central on getting started with Search Console

And one limit, stated plainly. Host-level counting, OxyPages' own included, won't count clicks, run funnels or keep years of history. If you need those, pair it with one of the script tools above, or use one on its own.

What To Do Next

Write down the three questions you actually ask about your site. If none of them involves a click or a campaign, use free host-level or Cloudflare counting and stop there. If one does, try Umami's free plan or a Plausible trial, run it beside GA4 for a month, then remove GA4 everywhere.

For where analytics sits alongside everything else a static site can and can't do, what a static website is has the overview.

If you want counting with nothing to install, host the site where statistics come built in. For a personal site, a free account includes them, no card needed. Pair it with a script tool later if you outgrow it.