Question 1

Why people leave Google Analytics

Accepted Answer

The consent banner. GA4 stores an identifier on the visitor's device, so in the EEA and the UK it needs consent, and every visitor who declines is a visitor you cannot count. Tools that identify visitors without touching the device sidestep both the banner and the hole in the numbers. What "storing on the device" actually means is set out here.
The legal position. Several EU regulators have ruled against particular GA deployments, and the Data Privacy Framework changed the ground again in 2023. It is not the simple "banned" a lot of posts claim, and it is not settled either: what the rulings actually said.
Reports that stop answering the question. Free GA4 keeps event-level data for at most 14 months, and explorations over 10 million events are sampled. Standard reports are neither. The moment you ask something unusual about a busy site, the answer is an estimate drawn from a window that has already closed.
The learning curve. GA4 is a modelling tool. If nobody on the team wants to define events and parameters before the first useful number, most of it goes unused.

Question 2

What to weigh before you pick one

Accepted Answer

Does it need a consent banner? Anything that writes a cookie or an id into local storage does, in the EEA and the UK. This is the single biggest difference between the products below, and it decides how much of your traffic you can actually see.
Where is the data, and for how long? "EU-hosted" and "kept for as long as you pay" are two separate promises, and most products make one of them. If you need last September next to this September in four years' time, ask before you migrate. Several products here, ours included, delete what your plan no longer covers.
Does it sample? Some products count every visit; some estimate above a threshold; two of them sample adaptively, which means a small site is not sampled at all and a large one is.
Do you need behaviour as well as traffic? Heatmaps, session recordings and feedback are a separate purchase from most analytics tools. If you are replacing GA and a heatmap tool, count both bills.
Do you have an app as well as a site? Most privacy-first analytics is web-only. If software people install is part of the question, that rules out several of these immediately.
Can you self-host it? Three of the products below are open source and two of those are straightforward to run yourself. That is the strongest possible answer to "where is my data", and it is a server somebody has to keep patched.
What happens to your history? Nothing here imports from Google Analytics, including ours. In practice you run both for a period and keep the GA property read-only. How to switch without losing it.

Question 3

Which to choose

Accepted Answer

If you want the banner gone and nothing else to change, look at Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics or ours. All four count without touching the visitor's device; they differ on price, on how many sites you get, and on whether they also cover apps and behaviour.
If the answer has to be "on my own server", it is Umami or Matomo. Umami is the lighter of the two and Matomo the more complete.
If you are replacing a heatmap tool at the same time, it is Matomo, Clarity, Mixpanel or ours. Clarity is free and costs you a consent banner; the others do not.
If the budget is zero and nothing else matters, Clarity or Cloudflare. Clarity gives you far more, and Microsoft holds the data.
If your real question is how the product is used rather than where the traffic came from, you want PostHog or Mixpanel, and you should expect to define events first.
If you have an app as well as a site, the field narrows to Matomo, PostHog, Mixpanel and ours.

	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

Google Analytics alternatives

Why people leave Google Analytics

What to weigh before you pick one

The alternatives to Google Analytics

Skomi Ours

Plausible

Umami

Matomo

Cloudflare Web Analytics

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Fathom Analytics

Simple Analytics

PostHog

Mixpanel

Firebase Analytics

All of them, side by side

Which to choose

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