Google Analytics 4 is “free” — right up until you read the fine print, hand over your visitors’ data, and bolt a cookie-consent banner onto every page. These three privacy tools take a different route. Plausible Analytics, Umami, and Fathom Analytics are all built to be a lighter, cookieless, privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative — and the cheapest of the three starts at literally $0/month. The question isn’t whether they’re good enough. It’s which one fits your budget and your appetite for setup work.
I’ve run all three: a self-hosted Umami instance on a cheap VPS for one of my own sites, plus Plausible and Fathom on their cloud trials. They look almost identical at a glance — one clean dashboard, one number that matters, no 14-tab menu. The differences that actually decide your choice are price, who hosts it, and how much terminal time you’re willing to spend. Let’s do the math.
Quick Verdict: Cheapest, Best Free, Best Paid
For readers who want the answer before the reasoning, here’s the short version of Plausible Analytics vs Umami vs Fathom Analytics:
- Truly free ($0): Umami. Self-host it under the MIT license and you pay nothing but your server bill. There’s also a genuinely free cloud tier (more on that below). If “free” is non-negotiable, this is your tool.
- Cheapest cloud / easiest free: Umami Cloud, then Plausible. Umami’s free cloud Hobby plan covers one site. If you want a paid, fully managed option, Plausible’s Starter plan begins at $9/month for a single site at 10k pageviews.
- Best paid / most polished: Fathom or Plausible. Both are zero-maintenance and beautifully simple. Fathom starts at $15/month with no free tier; Plausible is cheaper below roughly 100k pageviews and dearer above it, and is also open source.
One important distinction the typical two-way comparison glosses over: there’s a difference between “free to self-host” and “free to use.” Umami and Plausible are both open source and free to self-host — but self-hosting means you run the server. Fathom is closed-source cloud-only. We’ll split every price comparison into Cloud vs Self-hosted rows so you can see exactly what your $0 (or your $15) actually buys.
Price and Free Tiers, Cloud Against Self-Hosted
This is where most budget-conscious decisions get made — and where these three split apart. The trick is to compare like with like, because “self-hosted” and “cloud” are two completely different cost structures. Here’s the full breakdown.
| Option | Plausible | Umami | Fathom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud — free tier | None (30-day trial) | Free forever (Hobby: 1 site, 100k events/mo) | None (7-day trial) |
| Cloud — entry paid | $9/mo Starter, 10k views, one site | $20/mo Pro, 1M events, up to 20 sites | $15/mo ($150/yr), 100k views, 50 sites |
| Self-hosted | $0 + server (Community Edition) | $0 + server (MIT) | Not available |
| Open source | Yes (AGPL) | Yes (MIT) | No |
| Setup effort (self-host) | Moderate (Docker, Postgres, ClickHouse) | Easy (Node + one Postgres) | n/a |
A few things jump out. First, only Umami gives you a real free tier in the cloud — no card, no trial clock, no paywalled dashboard. Second, both Umami and Plausible let you self-host for $0 in licensing; your only cost is a server, which can be a $5/month VPS. Third, Fathom has neither a free tier nor a self-host option — you pay from day eight, full stop. That doesn’t make Fathom bad. It makes it the “I’ll pay to never think about servers” pick.
Plausible Analytics: Overview & Pricing
Plausible Analytics is the polished, EU-built name in this trio. Of the three, Plausible Analytics is the one most people have heard of. It’s open source (AGPL), GDPR-friendly by design, and it loads a famously lightweight script — under 1KB, which is a fraction of GA4’s payload. The dashboard is a single page: visitors, pageviews, sources, top pages, and goals, all without drowning you in dimensions you’ll never use.
Cloud pricing: Plausible Analytics has no free tier, but it runs a generous 30-day trial with no credit card. After that the plans split three ways at every traffic level. At 10,000 monthly pageviews it is $9/month for Starter (one site, three years of retention), $14 for Growth (three sites) or $19 for Business (ten sites, five years). Yearly billing takes two months off each. Traffic moves all three together: at 100k it is $19 / $29 / $39, and at a million pageviews $69 / $104 / $139. You pay for traffic rather than seats — but the entry price buys a single site, which matters if you run several.
Self-hosted pricing: Here’s the budget angle. Plausible Analytics publishes a self-hosted Community Edition that’s free to deploy on your own box. Licensing cost: $0. The catch is the stack — it runs on Docker with both Postgres and ClickHouse — so it’s heavier to stand up and maintain than Umami. Realistically you’ll want a slightly larger VPS (say $10–15/month) and some comfort with Docker Compose. If you have that, you get the full Plausible experience for the price of a server.
Who it’s for: Anyone who wants Plausible’s clean UX without the maintenance should take the cloud plan. Anyone who wants it for $0 and doesn’t mind running ClickHouse should self-host. Either way, it’s a solid Google Analytics alternative that keeps your EU data in Europe.
Umami: Overview and Pricing
Umami is the tool you reach for when “free” is the whole point. It’s open source under the permissive MIT license, and self-hosting it is free forever — no asterisk. Architecturally it’s the simplest of the three: a Node.js app and a single Postgres database. That’s it. No ClickHouse, no multi-container choreography. I had it running on a $5/month VPS in well under an hour, and it’s happily ticked along since.
Self-hosted pricing: $0 in licensing, plus whatever your server costs. Because the stack is so light, a cheap VPS — or even a free-tier deploy on a platform like Railway or Vercel for low traffic — is enough. For a budget-minded site owner who’s even slightly technical, this is the genuine $0 self-host path the other two can’t fully match.
Cloud pricing: Don’t want to touch a server? Umami Cloud has a real free tier — the Hobby plan covers one website, 100,000 events/month and six months of data retention at $0/month. When you outgrow it, Pro is a flat $20/month for 1M events and up to 20 sites, and Business is $200/month for 10M. The pricing is refreshingly simple: one number, billed on events, no tier maze.
The trade-off: Umami’s dashboard is a hair less polished than Plausible’s or Fathom’s, and historically it leaned a little more developer-flavored. But it covers the essentials — visitors, sources, pages, events, UTM tracking — with the same cookieless, privacy-focused approach. For most small sites, you will not miss the difference, and you’ll keep the savings.
Fathom Analytics: Overview & Pricing
Fathom Analytics is the “pay me and forget about it” option. It’s privacy-first, cookieless, GDPR-compliant, and ships an equally lightweight script. The dashboard is arguably the most refined of the three — fast, clean, and obviously built by people who care about design. If your time is worth more than your server bill, that polish matters.
Cloud pricing: Fathom starts at $15/month (or $150/year, about $12.50/month) for up to 100,000 monthly pageviews — and notably, that entry price already covers 50 sites, which is a real perk if you run several small properties. Higher pageview tiers scale up from there. There is a 7-day free trial to kick the tires.
The catches: two of them, and they’re the reason Fathom Analytics isn’t the budget winner. First, there is no free tier — once the trial ends, you pay. Second, Fathom is not open source and offers no self-hosted option, so the $0 route simply doesn’t exist here. You’re buying convenience and a beautiful UI, not a free lunch.
Who it’s for: Owners who happily pay a fair price to never log into a server, and who like that Fathom’s flat entry plan covers every site they own. As a managed Google Analytics alternative, it’s excellent — it just won’t get you to zero.
Privacy & GDPR: How the Three Compare
Here’s the good news: on privacy, all three are in the same league, and that league is a long way ahead of GA4. Every one of them is cookieless by default. They don’t drop tracking cookies, don’t build cross-site profiles, and don’t fingerprint your visitors. That single design choice is what lets you skip the cookie-consent banner for analytics in most cases — a genuine UX and compliance win.
- GDPR: All three are built to be GDPR-friendly because they don’t collect personal data or set cookies. With no cookies and no personal identifiers, the legal basis for a consent banner largely evaporates for analytics — though you should always confirm against your own setup and jurisdiction.
- EU data residency: Plausible is EU-built and keeps your EU data on European servers — the strongest residency story of the trio out of the box. Fathom offers EU isolation options too. With self-hosted Umami or Plausible, you choose the server location yourself, so residency is entirely in your hands.
- Data ownership: Self-hosting Umami or Plausible means the data never leaves your infrastructure. For the privacy purist, that’s the gold standard — and it costs $0 in licensing to get there.
The takeaway: don’t choose between these three on privacy grounds. They’re all privacy-first. Choose on price and hosting. For the bigger picture on why this matters, see the true cost of Google Analytics and what “free” really buys you.
Real Monthly Cost at 10k, 100k and 1M Pageviews
Sticker prices are one thing; what you’ll actually pay at your traffic level is another. So let’s run the numbers at three realistic volumes. (Note that Umami bills on events and Plausible/Fathom on pageviews — for a typical content site, one pageview is roughly one event, so these line up closely enough for budgeting.)
| Monthly traffic | Plausible (Starter / Growth) | Umami (cloud) | Fathom (cloud) | Self-host (Umami/Plausible) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $9 / $14 per mo | $0 (Hobby, 1 site) | $15/mo ($12.50 yearly) | ~$5/mo (VPS) |
| 100,000 | $19 / $29 per mo | $0 (Hobby, 1 site) | $15/mo ($12.50 yearly) | ~$5/mo (VPS) |
| 1,000,000 | $69 / $104 per mo | $20/mo (Pro) | $60/mo | ~$10/mo (bigger VPS) |
Read that 100k row again. A single site doing 100,000 monthly pageviews pays $0 on Umami’s Hobby tier, because it covers 100k events. The same traffic costs $19/month on Plausible Starter, $29 on Growth, and $15 on Fathom — so above roughly 100k pageviews the supposedly pricier tool is the cheaper one. Over a year that is the difference between $0 and $150–348, real money for a small business that could go toward content or ads instead.
Want to model your own exact numbers, including GA4’s hidden costs and add-ons? The math gets fiddly fast once you factor in retention, sites, and event overages, so use our free tool to estimate your monthly analytics cost for your real traffic. And if you’re still deciding whether to pay at all, start with the decision itself: do you really need paid analytics?
Which Should You Choose?
Forget abstract feature matrices. The real decision in Plausible vs Umami vs Fathom comes down to two questions: how much can you spend, and how comfortable are you with a server? Match yourself to one of these profiles.
“I want $0 and I’m a bit technical” → Self-hosted Umami
If you can follow a Docker tutorial and you own (or can rent) a $5/month VPS, self-hosted Umami is the cheapest real analytics you’ll find. MIT-licensed, dead-simple stack, your data on your server. This is the budget winner, full stop.
“I want free but won’t touch a server” → Umami Cloud (Hobby)
Umami’s free cloud tier covers one site and 100,000 events/month for $0. For a single blog or business site that is all the room you need — with zero setup and zero bill. Running several properties is where the free tier stops and the $20 Pro plan starts.
“I’ll pay a little for polish and EU data” → Plausible Cloud
From about $9/month yearly, Plausible Analytics gives you a gorgeous dashboard, strong EU data residency, and the comfort of an open source product you could self-host later if you change your mind. The best balance of price, polish, and principles.
“I run several sites and just want it done” → Fathom
At $15/month (or $150/year) with 50 sites on the entry plan, Fathom is the value pick for someone juggling multiple small properties who wants one tidy bill and zero maintenance. No free path, but excellent if you’d rather pay than tinker.
Still weighing the trio against the rest of the field? Our roundup of free web analytics tools puts these three in context, and if you’re assembling a complete toolkit, see how they slot into a wider free analytics stack.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is the cheapest: Plausible, Umami or Fathom?
Umami is the cheapest by a clear margin. Self-host it and the software costs $0 — you pay only for a server, which can be a $5/month VPS, and its cloud Hobby tier is genuinely free for one site at 100k events a month. Among the paid options the answer flips with traffic: Plausible Starter is cheapest at low volume ($9/month at 10k pageviews), but from roughly 100k pageviews Fathom takes over at a flat $15/month against Plausible’s $19 Starter and $29 Growth.
Can I self-host Plausible or Umami for free?
Yes — both are open source and free to self-host. Umami (MIT) is the simplest: a Node app plus one Postgres database, ideal for a cheap VPS. Plausible publishes a free Community Edition (AGPL), but its stack includes ClickHouse alongside Postgres, so it needs a slightly bigger server and more setup effort. Either way, the licensing cost is $0. Fathom cannot be self-hosted.
Are Plausible, Umami and Fathom GDPR-compliant without a cookie banner?
All three are cookieless and built to be GDPR-friendly. Because they don’t set tracking cookies or collect personal data, the usual trigger for a consent banner is largely removed for analytics. That said, compliance depends on your full setup and jurisdiction, so confirm your specific case rather than assuming. The privacy posture here is far stronger than GA4’s out of the box.
Is Umami really free forever?
Self-hosted Umami is free forever under the MIT license — you only pay for your own server. Umami Cloud also has a permanent free Hobby tier (one site, 100,000 events/month, 6-month retention) with no trial clock and no card required. So “free forever” is accurate for both the self-hosted and the entry cloud path.
Which is the best Google Analytics alternative for a small business?
For most small businesses, start with Umami‘s free cloud tier — it’s a capable Google Analytics alternative at $0 and takes minutes to set up. If you want a more polished dashboard and EU data residency and you’re happy to pay a little, choose Plausible Analytics from about $9/month. Pick Fathom Analytics if you run several sites and prefer one fixed, maintenance-free bill.
Picking One and Moving On
All three of these tools do the same core job — clean, cookieless, privacy-focused analytics that respect your visitors and skip the GA4 baggage. They’re all legitimate Google Analytics alternatives, and you can’t really make a bad choice among them. The only thing that separates them is money and effort.
If you want it free and you’re even slightly technical, self-host Umami for the cost of a $5/month VPS. If you want free without the server work, Umami’s cloud Hobby tier is $0. If you’ll pay a little for polish, go Plausible from about $9/month. And if you run several sites and just want it handled, Fathom Analytics at $15/month earns its keep. Budget-friendly doesn’t mean second-rate — in privacy analytics, the cheapest option is also one of the best. Save your money for what actually moves the needle.
Free-tier limits confirmed on the vendors’ own pricing pages, 13 August 2026.