Free Website Analytics Tools: 6 Options for Every Kind of Question

You launched. Now you want to know whether anyone showed up, where they came from and what they clicked. Google Analytics will tell you, after you click through a setup flow, a cookie banner and a dashboard that looks like an airline cockpit. There are lighter options that cost nothing, and each one is built for a different question.

Before the list, pick your question. It narrows the field fast.

What do you actually want to know?

• How many people visit and which pages they read: Umami or GoatCounter.
• Where people click and where they give up: Microsoft Clarity.
• What users do inside your product, step by step: PostHog.
• How people use a mobile or desktop app: Aptabase.
• Real time numbers on a single small site: Clicky.

Simple page view analytics

Umami

The Cloud Hobby plan costs $0 and covers up to 100,000 events a month for 1 website, with 6 months of retention and community support. If you would rather run it yourself, Umami is open source under the MIT license and needs Node.js 18.18 or newer plus PostgreSQL 12.14 or newer. One thing to do right after installing: the default login is admin and umami, so change it. The reviews on G2 lean toward "limited features", which is the price of a dashboard you can read in ten seconds. See Umami.

GoatCounter

Free for reasonable public use at goatcounter.com, and the homepage says personal sites and small to medium businesses are fine while millions of pageviews a day are not. The script is about 3.5K, there is a tracking pixel option that works with no JavaScript, and it sets no unique identifiers, so the README says no GDPR notice is needed. It is funded by donations. Reviewers say the interface looks a little rough, and that is a fair description. If you want a counter and nothing else, that is the point. See GoatCounter.

See what people do on the page

Microsoft Clarity

Free with no traffic limits and no sampling, for unlimited sites, projects and team members. You get click and scroll heatmaps and session recordings, plus Copilot in Clarity. The catches are specific. Recordings stay for 30 days, though favorites and a random sample are kept up to 9 months. You cannot delete or download individual recordings, and deleting data means deleting the whole project. In parts of the EEA, UK and Switzerland, cookie consent is enforced, which can affect funnels and recordings. See Microsoft Clarity.

Watching ten real sessions of someone failing to find your pricing page teaches more than a month of charts. Start here if your site gets traffic and nobody signs up.

Product analytics for real apps

PostHog

The free allowance is big: 1 million product analytics events a month, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 exceptions, 1,500 survey responses and 10 GB of logs. No card is needed until you pass the limits or want advanced features. Past the limit on the free plan, extra events are permanently dropped, so decide early whether you care about losing data. The cost is learning curve. G2 reviewers say you must design your events, funnels and dashboards, and that the interface can feel overwhelming as you adopt more of it. See PostHog.

Aptabase

Analytics for apps rather than websites. The free plan has 20,000 events a month, unlimited apps, EU or US data residency, a live dashboard and CSV export, with no card and no overage fees. SDKs cover Swift, Android and Kotlin, React Native, Flutter, Tauri, Electron, Web, Unity and more. The server is open source under AGPLv3 and free to self host. Because it avoids unique identifiers, there is no unique user count, and 20,000 events goes quickly if you log several per session. See Aptabase.

One more, with a small cap

Clicky

The 21 day trial opens 3 sites and 1 million daily page views, and after it ends the free plan shrinks to 1 site and 3,000 daily page views. Heatmaps and uptime monitoring need a paid plan. A Capterra reviewer called the interface outdated while also calling it simple. See Clicky.

Pick one and move on

• New site, want numbers by tonight: Umami cloud or GoatCounter.
• Site with traffic and low conversions: add Clarity beside either of them.
• Building a SaaS: PostHog from day one.
• Shipping an app: Aptabase.

Whichever you choose, write down three questions you want it to answer before you look at the first chart. Where do visitors come from? Which page do they read before leaving? Which button do they never press? Analytics that answers those three is already doing its job.