What is the best free analytics tool?
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 28 August 2026.
Free means at least four different things in this category, and the difference matters more than any feature comparison. Free forever with no caps. Free up to a usage limit. Free with your data expiring. And free as in a thirty-day trial, which is not free.
So this guide sorts by what the word actually buys. The good news is that the two most generous free tiers here are also two of the best products, which is not usually how this goes.
Our pick
A million events a month, five thousand session recordings, a million feature flag requests and a hundred thousand error exceptions, all free, every month. It replaces analytics, replay, flags, surveys and error tracking, so the free tier is doing the work of four tools. Usage-based pricing past that is hard to forecast, and the learning curve is steeper than a single-purpose dashboard.
What we judged on
- Free forever, or free until a trial ends
- What gets capped: events, sites, seats, or how long the data lives
- Whether the free tier is usable on a real site or only a demo
- What happens on the day you outgrow it
Also worth it
A hundred per cent free forever with no usage caps, ever: unlimited session recordings, heatmaps, click and scroll maps. Nothing else here gives that away. No paid tier means no support SLA, there are no funnels or cohorts, and Microsoft processes the data.
Unlimited pageviews under fair use on the free plan, no cookies, EU-hosted, and a dashboard a non-technical founder can read. The cap is thirty days of history, so it answers what is happening now and not what changed since spring.
Free and unlimited if you self-host, and the cloud hobby plan is free to roughly a hundred thousand events a month. The price is running a server and a database yourself.
Not for this job
It is a good tool and it is in our privacy guide for a reason, but it has no free tier, only a thirty-day trial. Same for Fathom and Rybbit. If you are shortlisting on free, those three come off the list before you compare features.
Prices, side by side
| Tool | From | Free tier |
|---|---|---|
| PostHog | Free | 1M events/month, 5k session recordings, 1M flag requests, 1.5k survey responses, 100k error exceptions, all free |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | 100% free forever: unlimited session recordings and heatmaps, no traffic limits or restrictions |
| Simple Analytics | Free, then $16.67/mo | Unlimited pageviews under fair-use policy, 1 user, 5 websites, but only 30-day data history |
| Umami | Free, then $20/mo | Self-hosting is always free and unlimited; Cloud Hobby free up to ~100k events/month |
| Plausible Analytics | From $7.50/mo | None |
Read on 28 August 2026. Every price change we have recorded.
Questions people ask
What is the most generous free analytics tier?
PostHog, at a million events a month across analytics, replay and feature flags. Microsoft Clarity is unlimited but narrower, covering recordings and heatmaps rather than product analytics.
Is Google Analytics still the free default?
It is free and it is still the most used, but it sets cookies, which means a consent banner, and it is the reason most people end up reading a page like this. The cookieless options remove the banner.
What happens when I outgrow a free tier?
It varies more than it should. PostHog bills usage past the free allowance, so the bill starts small and grows. Simple Analytics and Umami move you to a plan. The one to watch is any tool where the next tier is a large step rather than a slope.
This is one question about data analytics. See all 18 compared, or browse the other guides.