ProofStack research · 2026-08-08
Three Google Analytics alternatives, compared on public evidence only
First, what this is not: not a review. We have not lived with these products and do not judge their interfaces. What follows is the evidence anyone can verify themselves: pricing structure, revenue disclosures, and the acquisition playbook each site declares through its own structure. Observed 2026-08-08.
Why the "GA alternative" frame
Autocomplete data (Google and Bing, observed 2026-08-08) shows demand pools almost entirely under "google analytics alternative" (long tail: free, self hosted, open source). People search challenger-versus-incumbent, not challenger-versus-challenger: "plausible vs" completes to English synonyms, "umami vs" to food. The vendors behave accordingly: Plausible maintains vs-google-analytics and vs-matomo pages but no vs-fathom (we checked: 404).
Pricing: three kinds of transparency
- Plausible: fully crawlable pricing page. Three tiers at $9 / $14 / $19 per month, layered by sites and retention. Revenue publicly disclosed: $1M ARR, company-reported June 2022 — a four-year-old figure, so do not quote it as current.
- Fathom: usage-priced by pageviews (slider from 100k to 25M+); we verified $45/month at the 500k tier, extra sites in packs of 50 for $10/month, two months free on annual. Revenue not disclosed — and not disclosed does not mean zero.
- Umami: self-hosting is free (MIT license, 38,162 GitHub stars, verifiable). But its cloud pricing page is client-rendered — crawlers and AI answer engines cannot read its prices at all. That is a finding in itself: ask an AI what Umami costs and it can only guess. To know, you must open umami.is/pricing yourself.
Three entirely different playbooks (counted from their sitemaps)
- Plausible · content-led: 104 blog posts among 156 URLs, 8 comparison pages (including the famous "when not to use us" page), plus free tool pages. A heavy bet on content and trust.
- Fathom · minimalist: no public sitemap, zero blog posts — yet an llms.txt is deployed. The bet is on brand and AI readability rather than SEO page structure.
- Umami · open source: 103 URLs, 55 blog posts, and a dedicated /compare directory holding 14 comparison pages — the most aggressive comparison-page player of the three. The repository itself is the top acquisition channel.
Three judgments you can take away
- Same category, same incumbent, three alive playbooks — there is no standard answer, but every survivor bet heavily on one: 104 posts, or a 38k-star community, or minimalism so complete there is no sitemap. The half-hearted middle is the only losing position.
- Comparison pages can live anywhere, but they must exist: Umami built 14, Plausible 8, all aimed at "alternative" searches — consistent with what our Tally teardown found.
- Crawler-invisible pricing has a real cost now: in AI search, a price that cannot be read is a price that does not exist.
Method
Page counts come from each vendor's public sitemap on the stated date; prices are transcribed from the pricing pages that day; revenue appears only as dated public disclosures; autocomplete comes from Google's and Bing's public endpoints. We have no affiliate or commercial relationship with any of the three.