Google Analytics alternatives get recommended a lot, usually by people running one website. Running twenty client sites is a different problem. You are provisioning a property per client, wiring a tag manager per client, explaining a GA4 report nobody asked for, and watching consent banners quietly delete a chunk of your data before it ever arrives.
So here is the agency version of that list. What each option is genuinely good at, and where I landed after getting tired of the whole exercise.
What you are actually buying when you leave GA
Three things, and it helps to be honest about which one you care about. The first is simplicity, because GA4 is an enterprise product and most client questions are answered by five numbers. The second is privacy, which for a lot of agencies is really about consent banners and how much traffic you stop being able to see. The third is ownership, meaning the data sits somewhere you control instead of inside an ad company.
Most people say they want privacy and actually want simplicity. Both are fine reasons. Just know which one is driving the decision, because it changes the answer.
The options worth knowing
- Plausible. Simple, privacy-first, open source, and self-hostable if you want it to be. The dashboard is one page and a client can read it without training, which is worth more than it sounds
- Fathom. Same lightweight idea, strong on the multi-site case, easy to share a dashboard with a client without giving them a Google account
- Simple Analytics. Privacy-first with a focus on staying useful when consent banners and blockers are eating your numbers
- Matomo. The one that actually matches GA on feature depth, with heatmaps, session recording and funnels. Self-hosting it is the real differentiator if a client cannot let data leave their infrastructure
- Umami. Open source and lightweight, aimed at people who are happy to run it themselves and want no vendor in the middle
If you are switching because GA4 confuses your clients, almost any of these fixes it. If you are switching because you want to own the data, the list gets much shorter.
The self-hosting question
Self-hosting sounds like the obvious answer for ownership and it is a real commitment. Something has to run, get patched, get backed up, and stay up while you are on holiday. For one agency site that is a fun weekend. Across a book of client sites it is a job.
The version that works is when analytics is part of a platform you already run, so it is not one more service to babysit. That is a different thing from bolting a self-hosted analytics box onto twenty separate WordPress installs, which is how agencies end up with an analytics server nobody has updated in a year.
Renting analytics per client
- A property and a tag to provision on every new site
- Per-seat or per-site cost that grows with your book
- Client data lives with a third party
- A dashboard your client needs training to read
Analytics that ships with the platform
- One settings toggle per site, and it reports in with nothing else to wire up
- No per-site analytics bill
- Data sits on infrastructure you control
- One white-labeled view you hand the client
Join the Seedly owners community.
Owners trade setups, share add-ons, and swap playbooks. See what people are building before you commit.
What I run, and the honest caveat
I stopped picking an analytics vendor and built it into the platform instead. Seedly Sites ships first-party analytics in the platform, one toggle per site, so there are click heatmaps, scroll depth and dwell, and UTM and click-id attribution that survives the session and rides along to your CRM form embed. Collection is consent gated, and IPs are stored hash-only with a coarse country, never raw.
The caveat, because it matters. This is analytics bundled with a site platform, not a standalone product you would bolt onto sites you built elsewhere. If you are not running the platform, one of the five above is your answer. And if a specific client insists on GA4 for their own reporting reasons, you can still add the tag. Owning your analytics does not mean picking a fight with a client over theirs.
How to actually choose
If your problem is that clients cannot read GA4, take the simplest dashboard you can find and stop there. If your problem is compliance and data cannot leave the client's infrastructure, you are self-hosting and Matomo is the serious answer. If your problem is that analytics is one more thing to provision on every launch, the fix is not a better vendor, it is analytics that comes with the site.
The adjacent decision, where the sites themselves live, is in hosting client websites on Cloudflare Pages, and the fleet-management side is in managing many client websites from one dashboard.
Own the numbers you are being judged on.
