Question 1

Why people leave Firebase Analytics

Accepted Answer

Where the data is stored. Firebase "may process and store your data anywhere Google or its agents maintain facilities", and Analytics has no EU data residency option. For a company that has to answer that question in a procurement form or a DPA, no feature makes up for it.
It is Google. Behavioural data about your users sits with an advertising business. That is a position rather than a defect, and for a lot of teams it is the entire reason they are reading this page.
App and web are two different products. Firebase Analytics measures apps; the web side is GA4, a separate console with a separate data model. A product that ships both ends up with two tools and no single answer.
Consent. Firebase stores an app-instance identifier on the device, and Google's own guidance is that app IDs fall under privacy laws and need consent. Wiring that properly is work, and doing it badly is worse than not having analytics.
The 500-event ceiling. Not the usual reason, but a real one: 500 distinct event names is generous until a logEvent call takes a dynamic string and eats the budget in a week.

Question 2

What to weigh before you pick one

Accepted Answer

Before any product, three questions decide this more than any feature list.
Does it measure apps at all? Most privacy-first analytics tools are web-only and say so. Half the products on our own comparison table have no app SDK, and a page that offered them here would be answering a different question. Everything listed below has one.
Where is the data processed, and can you say so in writing? If the reason you are leaving is data location, get the answer as a sentence you could paste into a DPA before you migrate anything.
Is the app the whole story, or do you have a website too? If both, a tool that does one of them means two consoles for ever. If you only ship an app, that stops mattering and the field is wider.
Two more worth thinking about: whether you need crash reporting in the same tool, and whether you are relying on Firebase for things that are not analytics at all: Remote Config, A/B testing, push. Those do not move with your analytics and their absence is a cost of leaving.

Question 3

Which to choose

Accepted Answer

If the reason is cost, stay. Firebase is free and unlimited on volume, and nothing on this page beats that.
If the reason is where the data is stored, the shortlist is Matomo self-hosted, Mixpanel on EU residency, or Skomi. Get the answer in writing from whichever you pick.
If the reason is the app-and-web split, you want one tool that does both: GA4 if Google is fine, Matomo or Skomi if it is not.
If the reason is the rest of the platform (flags, experiments, crash reporting) then analytics is not really what you are replacing, and PostHog is the closest single answer.

	Skomi	Google Analytics	Plausible	Umami	Matomo	Cloudflare Web Analytics	Hotjar	Microsoft Clarity	Fathom Analytics	Simple Analytics	PostHog	Mixpanel	Firebase Analytics
Works without a cookie bannerOut of the box, with no configuration.	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Configurable	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	With cookieless mode on	No	No
Stores something on the visitor's deviceA cookie or an id in local storage. The law treats them the same.	No	Yes	No	No	Configurable	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Cookies by default	Yes	Yes
Counts every visit, without samplingBoth Google and Cloudflare sample adaptively, so a small site is not sampled at all. Hotjar does not sample; it stops, at a number of sessions set by the plan.	Yes	Explorations over 10M events	Yes	Yes	Yes	Adaptive sampling	Capped per plan	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Not checked	Not checked	High-cardinality dimensions
Keeps your full history for as long as you are a customerSkomi does not: it deletes analytics once the plan's window has passed, and the window each plan sells is on the pricing page. A cell reads "Not checked" where the product publishes no figure we could verify. Plausible documents "5+ years" for Enterprise but states nothing for its standard plans, and Cloudflare documents no retention period at all.	No	Reports yes, event data 2 to 14 months	Not checked	Your own database, self-hosted	Reports forever, raw data 24 months on cloud; your own database self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Sites	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Web, through GA4
Mobile and desktop apps	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Heatmaps	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Not checked	Yes	No
Session recordings	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Feedback boards	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Reports where your traffic comes from	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data stored in the EU	Yes	No	Yes	Your choice	Your choice	No	Not checked	No	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Yes	No
Open source	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Capture script only	No	Not checked	Yes	Not checked	SDKs only
Can be self-hosted	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Not checked	Yes, officially unsupported	Not checked	No
Surveys and user interviews	No	No	No	No	Not checked	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Not checked	No
More than one site on the free planSkomi's free plan carries one site, which is a real reason to pick something else if you look after several small ones. Google and Cloudflare read "Not checked" because how many sites their free tiers cover was not verified. That they HAVE a free tier is the row above.	No	Not checked	No	Unlimited, self-hosted	Unlimited, self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free tierSkomi's is the Hobby plan: one site, no card.	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Self-hosted only	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Firebase Analytics alternatives

Why people leave Firebase Analytics

What to weigh before you pick one

The alternatives to Firebase Analytics

Skomi Ours

Google Analytics

Matomo

Microsoft Clarity

PostHog

Mixpanel

All of them, side by side

Which to choose

One script, or one SDK. The same reports either way.