Three popular alternatives to Google Analytics, all marketed as privacy-friendly — but built for very different jobs. Here’s how to choose without overpaying or under-instrumenting.
Research-based overview. This article synthesizes vendor documentation, pricing pages, and user reports — not first-person production testing of every plan. Where hands-on impressions exist, they’re called out explicitly. See our editorial policy.
Plausible is the right pick when you want a clean, cookieless replacement for Google Analytics on a marketing site — pageviews, sources, top pages, that’s it. Fathom serves roughly the same audience but with a slightly broader feature set and a more polished UI — useful when you want one extra step beyond minimalist without becoming a product analytics tool. PostHog is the right pick when you need product analytics: events, funnels, retention cohorts, session replay, feature flags, and A/B testing — in other words, when you’re measuring what users do inside the app, not just on the marketing pages.
“If you can answer ‘what page did they visit’ with Plausible or Fathom, you don’t need PostHog. The moment the question becomes ‘what did they do inside the app, and where did they drop off’, the answer flips.”
We synthesized vendor documentation, public pricing pages at plausible.io/pricing, posthog.com/pricing, and usefathom.com/pricing, plus user reports from Reddit, Hacker News, and indie hacker communities.
Solo SaaS founders deciding between a lightweight web-stats tool and a fuller product analytics suite, who want to make one good decision now and not migrate again at 1,000 users.
Teams who specifically need Google Analytics 4 because of an existing ad-spend or BigQuery export pipeline — that’s a different category of problem and none of these are drop-in replacements for that workflow.
All three vendors have changed their plans within the last year — PostHog’s per-event metering in particular has shifted. Always confirm current numbers at the linked pricing pages before subscribing. Figures here reflect publicly listed plans as of May 2026.
Calling all three “privacy-first analytics” obscures how different they actually are. The category contains tools that compete only on the surface; below the marketing pages they’re solving distinct problems.
Plausible is a deliberately simple web analytics tool. One small script, no cookies, a single dashboard with pageviews, unique visitors, top sources, top pages, top countries, and a few goal-conversion features. There are no individual user profiles, no event funnels in the rich sense, no session recording. It is, by design, “Google Analytics without the Google Analytics”. The product was built in the open, the company is bootstrapped, and the philosophy is “less is more”. Pricing is per pageview, not per user.
Fathom sits in roughly the same lane as Plausible — cookieless, GDPR-friendly, marketing-site-shaped — but with a polished UI, slightly more advanced filters and segments, and a few additional features (like email reports, more granular goal tracking, and a UTM-builder). It is closer to “clean web analytics with a touch more depth” than to product analytics. Fathom is also bootstrapped and committed to a privacy-by-default posture. Pricing is per pageview, similar to Plausible.
PostHog is a different animal: a full product analytics suite with event tracking, funnels, retention, paths, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, and a SQL query interface over your raw event data. It is what you reach for when the question is “why did users drop off in step 3 of onboarding” or “does the new pricing page convert better than the old one”. PostHog is venture-backed, open-source, and offers a cloud product plus a self-hostable open-source edition. Pricing is per event captured, with a generous free tier.
All three are priced for solo founders to start free or near-free. The diverging point comes as you scale.
The key thing to understand: pageviews and events are different units. A simple marketing site might generate 10,000 pageviews per month. The same site plus a SaaS application that fires 5–10 events per active user session can easily generate hundreds of thousands of events. This makes a direct dollar-for-dollar comparison misleading. The right framing is “how much volume does my use case actually produce” rather than “which tool has the lowest entry price”. Our PostHog pricing breakdown walks through how the per-event line item really lands at typical SaaS volumes.
All three are positioned as GDPR-friendly, but the nuances differ.
Plausible is cookieless by default, does not use any persistent identifiers, and explicitly markets itself as not requiring a cookie consent banner under EU rules. Data is stored in the EU. The script weighs in at under 1 KB. For a marketing site that wants “legally clean by default” with no consent banner, Plausible is the easiest answer.
Fathom takes a similar cookieless, no-PII approach, with EU-compliant data handling and an explicit no-cookie-banner-required positioning. The implementation differs in the details — Fathom uses a hashed daily fingerprint to deduplicate visitors without identifying them — but the practical privacy posture is comparable.
PostHog is more flexible and therefore more your responsibility. PostHog can be configured cookieless, but the default install captures events tied to a distinct ID stored in localStorage, which under strict EU interpretations may require a banner. PostHog supports anonymization, IP masking, and EU data residency on cloud, but you have to configure these correctly. For pure marketing-site analytics, this is overkill. For product analytics where you genuinely need to attribute behavior to users, you accept some compliance overhead in exchange.
Self-hosting matters for two reasons: cost at scale, and data ownership.
Plausible Community Edition is open-source and self-hostable via Docker. It includes the core web analytics product but lacks some hosted-only conveniences (like the shared-dashboards feature on the same plan as cloud users). Maintenance is real but modest — a small VPS handles meaningful traffic.
PostHog OSS is the most full-featured self-host in this comparison. The entire stack — analytics, replay, feature flags, surveys — is open-source and runs on your own infrastructure. Operationally it’s heavier than Plausible CE because of the underlying ClickHouse database, but for high-event-volume use cases the cost savings vs. cloud add up quickly.
Fathom does not offer a self-hosted version. It is a hosted product only. If self-hosting is a hard requirement, Fathom is off the list.
The cleanest decision framework is to separate two different jobs and assign the right tool to each.
If you want to know which blog posts drive signups, which traffic sources convert, and which countries your readers come from — and you do not need to know what individual users do inside your app — Plausible or Fathom is the right pick. Both will be cheaper, faster to set up, and easier to read than PostHog. Plausible wins on simplicity and the lowest entry price; Fathom wins on a slightly more polished UI and more headroom on the entry plan. Either is fine.
If you need funnels, retention, session recordings, or feature flags — PostHog. The other two simply do not do these jobs. Trying to retrofit funnel analysis on top of Plausible by piping events into Google Sheets is a known anti-pattern; you end up rebuilding PostHog poorly. The right move is to accept the additional complexity (and event volume) of a product analytics tool when the questions you’re asking actually require one.
Plenty of solo SaaS founders run both — Plausible (or Fathom) on the marketing site for clean cookie-free pageview stats, PostHog inside the app for events and replay. The combined cost at small scale is often $10–$20/month total, and the separation keeps each tool in its zone of strength. We mention this combination in our best SaaS tools for developers roundup as well.
The table below highlights PostHog as the broadest tool, but “broadest” is not the same as “best for everyone”. For a marketing site only, Plausible is the cleaner pick. Read the verdict section for the per-use-case answer.
| Feature | Plausible | Fathom | PostHog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $9/mo @ 10K pv | $15/mo @ 100K pv | Free up to 1M events |
| Free tier | Trial only | Trial only | Generous, ongoing |
| GDPR cookieless | Default | Default | Configurable |
| Self-host | Plausible CE | Hosted only | PostHog OSS |
| Events & funnels | Goals only | Goals only | Full |
| Session recording | No | No | Yes |
| Feature flags | No | No | Yes |
| A/B testing | No | No | Yes |
| Data ownership | EU hosted / self-host | EU option | EU option / self-host |
Plausible wins for the founder who wants the simplest, cookie-free marketing-site analytics tool that just works. Fathom wins for the founder with the same audience profile but who wants a slightly more polished UI and more headroom on the entry plan. PostHog wins decisively the moment the question becomes “what are users doing inside my app, and where do they drop off”. None of the three is a strict superset; they answer different questions.
Solo SaaS sites that want clean, cookieless web stats: marketing-page traffic, top sources, conversion goals. The lowest-friction Google Analytics replacement.
Founders who need event-level product analytics or session replay — that’s out of scope by design.
The same audience as Plausible — but who want one extra step beyond minimalist: a more polished UI, more granular filters and goals, and more headroom on the entry pricing tier.
Founders who require self-hosting (Fathom is hosted only) or who need product analytics features.
Product-analytics needs — funnels, retention cohorts, session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys. The full suite from one vendor with a generous free tier. See our PostHog review.
Pure marketing-site analytics where the simplicity-and-no-cookie-banner of Plausible or Fathom is the actual goal — PostHog can do this job but it’s overkill and the default config is heavier on compliance than the lightweight tools.
For most solo SaaS founders we recommend a two-tool setup: Plausible (or Fathom) on the marketing pages, PostHog on the application. Set Plausible up first — it takes ten minutes — and you have your headline traffic and conversion picture immediately. Then add PostHog inside the authenticated app once you have something worth measuring. The reason to split rather than consolidate is that the marketing-site reporting is much faster and cleaner in a focused tool than buried in a product analytics dashboard, and the cookieless / no-banner posture on the public site stays clean.
If you only have budget for one and you’re still pre-launch — pick PostHog’s free tier. The 1M-event ceiling is plenty for an early-stage product, and you get optionality on funnels, replay, and flags as soon as your traffic justifies them. You can always add Plausible later when you start optimizing the marketing site seriously and want a separate, cleaner view of public-page traffic.
If you’re post-launch with a content-driven funnel and the SaaS app itself is light on in-app behavior — pick Plausible first and skip PostHog until you have a real product question that requires it. Premature instrumentation is an under-discussed cost: it’s not free to maintain event taxonomy that nobody reads. Our guide to the SaaS metrics that actually matter goes deeper on which numbers to instrument first, and our cohort analysis explainer covers when retention measurement starts to matter.
Whichever route you take, the migration cost between any two of these tools is low. The data model is simple, the scripts are one or two lines of HTML, and the dashboards are interchangeable in spirit. Don’t agonize over the choice for more than an afternoon — instrument something today, and revisit when the questions you’re asking actually outgrow your tool.
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