Google Analytics alternatives without cookies: how to choose
A buyer’s checklist for privacy-friendly analytics: hosting, consent, data ownership, search data, multi-site views and real cost per website.
· 4 min read
People leave Google Analytics for three reasons: the consent banner (and the data it loses), the complexity of GA4, and the feeling that their visitors' data is feeding someone else's ad business. There are now many good cookie-free alternatives. This guide doesn't crown a winner; it gives you the questions that decide which one fits your situation.
First, decide what job you are hiring the tool for
| Your situation | What you actually need |
|---|---|
| One site, you only want traffic numbers | A simple, cookie-free traffic counter |
| Several sites (yours or clients') | A view of all sites at once, per-site access, reports |
| SEO is how you get customers | Search data (Search Console, Bing) next to traffic |
| You sell online | Goals, funnels and revenue per source |
| You must keep data in-house | Self-hosting |
Most comparison articles list features. The better question is which of these jobs you have, because a tool that is perfect for one site can be painful at ten.
The checklist
1. Does it need a consent banner? Look for "no cookies, no localStorage, no fingerprinting". If the tool stores anything on the device, you are back to a banner and sampled data. Background in Do you need a cookie banner for web analytics?.
2. Where is the data hosted, and who is the processor? For EU visitors, prefer EU hosting and a data processing agreement that applies automatically.
3. How does it count visitors? Ask how unique visitors are calculated without cookies and how long identifiers live. A daily-rotating hash is the common privacy-first approach; see How cookieless analytics counts unique visitors.
4. Can you export your data? CSV export or an API, and what happens to your data if you leave.
5. Does it show search data? GA4 never showed you which Google searches brought visitors; that lives in Search Console. If organic search matters to you, a tool that shows Search Console (and ideally Bing) next to traffic saves a daily context switch.
6. How does it handle multiple sites? Is there one view for all sites? Can you give a client access to only their site, or a password-protected public dashboard? Is the price per site or per account?
7. What does it cost per site? Compare plans by the number of sites and monthly events you really have. A cheap plan for one site can become expensive at ten.
8. What else would you have to pay for? Uptime monitoring, an SEO crawler, Core Web Vitals tracking, PDF reports for clients. Count the tools you would no longer need.
The main families of alternatives
- Simple, cookie-free traffic analytics (for example Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami). Clean dashboards, privacy by design, focused on traffic. Great for one or a few sites when traffic is all you need.
- Full analytics suites you can self-host (for example Matomo). Very complete and you can run it on your own server, at the cost of setup and maintenance.
- Unified dashboards for several sites that combine cookie-free analytics with search data and monitoring. This is where byanalytics sits.
Features and prices change often, so check each vendor's current pricing page before you decide.
When byanalytics is the right choice, and when it isn't
byanalytics is built for people who run more than one website and care about search: freelancers, agencies, makers with several projects. It combines a 2 KB cookie-free script with Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, a technical SEO crawler, Core Web Vitals, uptime with SSL and domain expiry warnings, and PDF reports, for all your sites in one dashboard, using only free data sources.
If you have a single site and only want a visitor counter, a simpler tool will do. If you would otherwise juggle GA4, Search Console, Bing, PageSpeed and an uptime tool for several sites, that's the case we built for. The Free plan covers 1 site (10K events a month, 30 days of data) and Pro has a 14-day trial with no card: compare the plans or see the live demo. The setup we recommend is described in How to monitor multiple websites from one dashboard.
FAQ
What is the best Google Analytics alternative without cookies?
It depends on the job: for one site and traffic only, a simple cookie-free counter is enough; for self-hosting, a full suite like Matomo; for several sites where search matters, a unified dashboard that also shows Search Console, Bing, SEO health and uptime.
Can I import my Google Analytics data into an alternative?
Some tools import historical GA data; others, like byanalytics, can connect GA4 to compare its numbers side by side while you switch. Check whether the import keeps sources and pages, not only totals.
Will I lose data by switching from Google Analytics?
You usually gain data: without a consent banner, cookie-free tools count the visitors who would have declined cookies. Keep GA running for a few weeks in parallel if you want to compare.
Do cookie-free analytics tools work with Shopify and WordPress?
Yes. They are a single script tag, so they work with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, static sites and JavaScript frameworks.
Keep reading
- How cookieless analytics counts unique visitors The daily-salted hash behind cookie-free analytics, explained: what is collected, what is thrown away, and how accurate the numbers really are.
- Do you need a cookie banner for web analytics? What the ePrivacy rules and the GDPR actually require for analytics, when a cookie-free tool lets you skip the banner and what you still have to tell visitors.
- How to monitor multiple websites from one dashboard Traffic, Google and Bing search, SEO health, Core Web Vitals and uptime for every site you run, in one place: a practical setup for freelancers and agencies.