Web Analytics

Tools that count visitors and pageviews on your website, compared for a small team that launches many small sites (dozens, growing) and wants AI agents to do the analytics work.

Our pick

Umami. One API key lets an agent read stats and create sites. It has an official MCP server, sets no cookies (so no consent banner), and Flowershow supports it natively.

• Dozens of sites: self-host it on Railway, for about $10 a month. Railway automates updates and backups (see the fine print).
• Up to 20 sites, nothing to run: Umami Cloud Pro, $20 a month. The next plan up is $200.
• Free: Google Analytics 4. It costs $0 at any scale, but it needs a cookie banner in the EU and UK and more set-up for agents. See the bake-off below.

What we compared on

1. Price per month at our scale: dozens of sites, about 150k pageviews a month, most of them on one site.
2. Hassle: setup, upkeep (upgrades, backups, uptime), and the steps to add a site. If you have little time, an hour of upkeep a quarter costs more than a $10 a month saving.
3. Agent ease (the key criterion): how many steps to give an AI agent access, whether there is a long-lived key, whether the API can both read stats and create sites, and whether there is an official MCP server.
4. Features, scored 1–5: how many of the features below it covers well. The reason for each score is in the fine print.
5. Secondary: is a cookie banner needed, and is there native support in your site builder (here, Flowershow supports GA4 and Umami)?

Key analytics features

Bake-off: Umami vs Google Analytics 4

Deciding factor: no banner and easier agent access, against $0. If price comes first and you will add a banner, choose GA4. If you want every visitor counted, no banner and one-key agent access, choose Umami.

Bake-off: Umami vs Plausible

Both are privacy-first, cookieless and open source, and they look alike.

Deciding factor: agent access and cost at many sites. Plausible's dashboard is a little more polished. But its API sits behind the Business plan, more than 10 sites needs a quote, and self-hosting it is heavier.

Bake-off: Umami vs PostHog

Deciding factor: what you need to learn. For "is anyone coming, and from where?" across many content sites, Umami is lighter and needs no banner. For how people use an app, PostHog is far deeper and free to start. Many teams run both: Umami on the marketing sites, PostHog in the app.

All options

✅ good · 🟡 OK · ❌ poor · ❓ not confirmed

Fine print

Feature scores, briefly:

• GA4 5: covers everything above except replay, and links to Search Console and Ads. Explorations are clunky.

• PostHog 5: product analytics, replay, flags, experiments and SQL. Basic web stats are a secondary view.

• Matomo 5: close to GA4, with heatmaps and replay as paid plugins.

• Umami 4: traffic, UTMs, events, goals, funnels, retention, journeys, attribution, revenue and Web Vitals. No Search Console link or replay.

• Plausible 4: traffic, UTMs, goals, funnels and a Search Console link. Funnels and revenue need the Business plan.

• Fathom 3: traffic, UTMs and events. No funnels or retention.

• Pirsch 3: traffic, UTMs, events and funnels. A small product.

• GoatCounter 2: pageviews, referrers and campaigns. Events only as fake paths.

• Cloudflare 1: pageviews, referrers and Web Vitals. The dashboard shows only the last 6 months, with no custom events and no UTMs.

• Umami self-hosted on Railway:

  • The ~$10 is our estimate from Railway's rates, not a measured bill. Railway Hobby is $5 a month including $5 of usage; RAM is about $10/GB, and Umami plus Postgres is about 1 GB.
  • Deploy: a one-click template (Umami + Postgres, 4,000+ deploys). There is also a GraphQL public API with workspace- and project-scoped tokens, and a CLI, so an agent can run it.
  • Updates: image auto-updates per service, patch-only or minor too; forum threads report occasional misses.
  • Backups: scheduled daily, weekly or monthly, kept 6, 27 and 89 days.
  • Yours: major upgrades, an occasional restore test, an uptime check.
  • The MCP server is built in from Umami v3.4; turn it on with MCP_ENABLED=1.

• Umami Cloud: Hobby is free but allows 1 site and no API. Pro is $20 for 1M events and 20 sites, with $0.00003 per extra event. Business is $200 for 10M events and unlimited sites. Collection isn't cut off when you go over.

• GA4:

  • Agents need a Google Cloud project, the Admin and Data APIs enabled, and an OAuth or service-account login per Google account. Data API quota is 200k tokens per property per day.
  • The official MCP runs locally, is labelled experimental, and serves one Google account per instance. It can run arbitrary reports but cannot create properties.

• PostHog: 1M events free, and pageviews count as events. The free plan has 1 project; more need a card. The MCP is remote, can read and write, and has a read-only mode. It is built for product analytics (funnels, flags, replay).

• Cloudflare Web Analytics:

  • Free on all plans, but not analytics over time. The dashboard shows only the last 6 months. Unsampled data is kept 7 days, then aggregated to about 10%. Queries are sampled dynamically.
  • No custom events, and query strings are dropped, so no UTMs (FAQ).
  • 10 sites per account by default (raise it via support). Its GraphQL and analytics MCP servers are deprecated in favour of a general Cloudflare API MCP.
  • Good as a zero-install traffic check on proxied sites.

• Plausible: cloud plans cover up to 10 sites below Enterprise, and the Stats API is Business plan only. The self-hosted Community Edition (AGPL) needs Postgres plus ClickHouse and at least 2 GB RAM, and has no sites API.

• GoatCounter: free hosted "for reasonable public usage", supported by donations. The API takes a Bearer key at 4 requests a second and offers CSV export. It can self-host as a single binary with SQLite.

• Fathom: $15 covers 100k pageviews and $25 covers 200k, with 50 sites included; extra sites are $10 per 50. The API is on all plans, and the key can be read-only or site-scoped.

• Matomo: the Cloud price for 300k hits isn't shown. On-premise is free (GPL) but needs PHP and MySQL. Its MCP plugin is an early preview.

• Pirsch: $6 for 10k pageviews with 50 sites; the price at 200k isn't shown. The MCP is community-maintained.

Can GA4 run without a cookie banner?

Mostly no, for EU and UK visitors. GA4 sets _ga cookies. Ways people try, from safest to riskiest (not legal advice):

So if you want no banner and EU visitors, use a cookieless tool such as Umami, Plausible or Fathom.

Sources: Google Analytics cookie usage, consent mode, ICO exceptions, CNIL sheet 16.

Appendix: why does Google Analytics still use cookies and need a banner?

GA4 could count visitors without cookies. Google chooses not to, because GA4 is built to serve its ads business.

How Umami counts without cookies. It stores nothing in the browser. It builds a visitor ID by hashing data the browser sends anyway: IP address, browser details and the site, plus a secret value that it replaces periodically. That's enough to count unique visitors and sessions within that window. Once the secret changes, the same person looks new.

Why GA4 doesn't do the same. GA4 is designed around a long-lived visitor ID in a cookie, kept for up to 2 years, plus Google signals, which links visitors across devices for signed-in Google users. That persistent ID is what feeds:

• Ads conversion tracking and remarketing audiences, the main reason Google offers GA free;
• returning-user and retention reports per person over months;
• cross-device journeys and demographics.

A rotating hash would break all of these. Google's answer for people who refuse cookies is Consent Mode: send limited pings and estimate the missing visitors with a model.

What you lose with Umami's approach:

• For content sites: little. Visitors, pageviews, referrers, UTMs, events and funnels all work fine.
• Real losses: accurate "same person came back 3 months later" counts, cross-device tracking, demographics, and Ads audiences and attribution. None of these matter unless you run Google Ads or need long-term retention per person.

One caveat: Umami's approach still processes IP addresses. Most EU and UK guidance treats it as not needing a banner, but EU regulators' 2023 guidance on what counts as accessing a device is broad, so "no banner" is the common reading rather than a ruling.

Checked 17 Oct 2026

Sources: Umami pricing, Umami docs (FAQ, API auth, MCP), Railway pricing, PostHog pricing, Fathom, GoatCounter, Plausible, Cloudflare Web Analytics and MCP servers, Matomo, Pirsch, plus the links in the fine print.