Cookieless analytics tools compared: Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Umami, Matomo and BusinessMCP

Name: BusinessMCP
Brand: BusinessMCP

Six privacy-first analytics tools on price, self-hosting, attribution and AI access — with the honest reasons to pick each one.

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Price: Plausible $9 · Fathom $15 · Simple Analytics $20 · Umami free/$20 · Matomo free/~€23–29 · BusinessMCP free/$19–$499 (all per month)
Switching gets you: Every tool here drops the cookie banner; only BusinessMCP adds the visiting company, six attribution models, a CRM and an MCP endpoint your AI can query.
Stay with Cookieless analytics tools if: Pick Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics for the simplest dashboard, Umami or Matomo to self-host, and BusinessMCP when analytics needs to feed sales.

Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
	BusinessMCP	Plausible	Fathom	Simple Analytics	Umami	Matomo
Entry price	Free (300 visitors); $19/mo	$9/mo (10k pageviews)	$15/mo (100k pageviews)	$20/mo (free plan, 30-day history)	Free (100k events); $20/mo	Free self-hosted; ~€23–29/mo Cloud
Cookieless by default	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Optional
Cookie banner required for analytics (EU)	No	No	No	No	No	Depends on config
Ad-blocker-resilient first-party script	Yes (your subdomain)	Yes (proxy setup)	Yes (custom domain)	Yes (custom domain)	Self-hosted on your domain	Self-hosted on your domain
Multi-touch attribution models	6 models	No	No	No	No	Yes (paid plugin)
Names the visiting company	Yes (Starter)	No	No	No	No	No
AI can query it (MCP endpoint)	Yes	No	No	No	No	No
Session replay + heatmaps in the same tool	Yes (Growth)	No	No	No	No	Yes (paid plugins)
Open source or self-hosted	No	Yes (AGPL)	No	No	Yes (MIT)	Yes (GPL)

The full picture

Cookieless analytics became a category because the alternative — a consent banner in front of Google Analytics — costs a slice of every audience and still leaves an EU transfer question. The tools below all measure without a cookie and without a banner. They differ on what else they do, whether you can run them yourself, and what they cost as traffic grows.

This roundup ranks nothing. Each tool is listed with its verified September 2026 price, what it is best at, and the reasons you would not pick it — BusinessMCP included. Prices come from each vendor’s public pricing page where it is readable, and from two published 2026 teardowns where the page is a JavaScript slider (Plausible volume tiers, Matomo Cloud, Umami Cloud).

The tools, honestly assessed

Plausible — the reference simple dashboard

From $9/mo for 10k pageviews (Starter), $14 Growth, $19 Business, scaling with volume; 30-day trial; AGPL Community Edition to self-host. One page, goals, funnels on Business, public shared links. No company identification, no multi-touch attribution, no AI layer.

Fathom Analytics — every feature on every plan

$15/mo for 100k pageviews up to $470 for 25M, at least 50 sites included, EU visitor data processed in the EU, public or password-protected dashboards, 7-day trial. Not open source, analytics only.

Simple Analytics — one page, no configuration

$20/mo self-serve with a pageview slider (roughly 100k to 2.5M), $20 per extra user, a free plan that keeps 30 days of history for 1 user and 5 sites, 14-day trial, enterprise with raw data access. Analytics only.

Umami — MIT-licensed and light

Free to self-host under the MIT licence; Umami Cloud has a free Hobby plan (100k events, 3 sites, 6 months of data) and a Pro plan at $20/mo for 1M events with longer retention per published 2026 teardowns. Minimal, fast, no attribution models, no AI layer.

Matomo — the open-source GA

Free On-Premise under the GPL with unlimited hits; Cloud from roughly €23–29/mo for 50k hits with a 21-day trial. Deepest feature set here — segments, multi-channel attribution, heatmaps and replay as paid plugins — and the most to operate. Cookieless is a setting, not the default.

BusinessMCP — analytics that feeds sales

Free to 300 unique visitors/mo, then $19–$499. Cookieless by default, first-party, six attribution models, the visiting company on Starter, heatmaps and replay on Growth, a CRM, Stripe revenue, an AI business analyst and an MCP endpoint. Not open source, no public stats page, no product analytics.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/crm

Journey

7 visits

Anonymous visitor · desktop · IN · first touch Direct

/website-visitor-identification → /pricing
Direct· 9 pages· 61 minscroll_90
Sep 4
/ → /login
Direct· 3 pages· 22scta_click
Sep 7
Identified
Email captured — stitched to the full journey, added to the CRM as a lead.
Sep 7
/
Organic Search· 3 pages· 33 min
Sep 8
/
Organic Search· 1 page· 9s
Sep 10
/
Organic Search· 1 page· 5s
Sep 11
/
Organic Search· 1 page· 9s
Sep 15
/ → /guides/llms-txt-guide
Organic Search· 10 pages· 62 minform_submitcta_clickguide_subscribescroll_90
Sep 16

A real journey from our own CRM — identity redacted. Yours look like this from day one.

Entry prices, verified September 2026

Plan	Price	Notes
Plausible	from $9/mo	10k pageviews; Growth $14, Business $19; self-host free (AGPL)
Fathom Analytics	from $15/mo	100k pageviews, 50 sites; $470/mo at 25M
Simple Analytics	$20/mo	free plan with 30-day history; +$20 per extra user
Umami	Free (Hobby) / $20/mo (Pro)	100k events free; 1M events on Pro; self-host free (MIT)
Matomo	Free self-hosted / ~€23–29/mo Cloud	50k hits; Cloud tiers to 5M hits; hits count events too
BusinessMCP	Free / $19–$499/mo	300 unique visitors free; company ID from $19; replay from $79

Vendor pages read directly: usefathom.com/pricing, simpleanalytics.com/pricing, plausible.io (entry tiers), matomo.org/pricing (tiers and On-Premise bundles). Slider-only rates from 2026 teardowns are marked “~”.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

Google Analytics 4 is free at any traffic volume and ships Explorations plus a BigQuery export. BusinessMCP has no exploration builder and no warehouse export — the Free plan caps at 300 unique visitors a month and there is no Google Ads native linking.
If you only want a pageview dashboard, Plausible ($9/mo) and Fathom ($15/mo) are cheaper for pure analytics, and both offer a public shareable stats page that BusinessMCP does not have.
BusinessMCP is not open source and cannot be self-hosted. Matomo and Umami can run entirely on your own server for a $0 licence, which is the right answer for a strict data-residency policy or a zero-vendor stack.
Raw events are retained for up to 13 months (sessions and daily rollups are kept for the life of the account). Plausible advertises three-to-five-year retention on paid plans and a self-hosted Matomo keeps whatever you keep.
Product-analytics features — feature flags, user-cohort funnels, experiments on app events, error tracking — belong to PostHog or Mixpanel. BusinessMCP measures websites and the business behind them, not in-app product usage.

Frequently asked questions

What does “cookieless analytics” actually mean?

The script sets no cookie and stores no identifier in the browser; visitors are counted from request data (and, in most tools, a daily-rotating hash) rather than a persistent ID. That is why these tools do not need a consent banner for basic measurement in most jurisdictions — check the tracking-laws guide for the exceptions.

Which cookieless tool is cheapest?

Umami and Matomo are free if you self-host, and Umami Cloud’s Hobby plan is free to 100k events. Among hosted paid tools Plausible starts lowest at $9/mo for 10k pageviews; Fathom’s $15 covers 100k pageviews and 50 sites. BusinessMCP is free to 300 unique visitors, then $19.

Which one should a B2B company choose?

If the analytics exist to feed a sales motion, BusinessMCP is the only tool here that names the visiting company, credits multiple attribution models and keeps a CRM in the same product. If you only need traffic numbers on a public dashboard, Plausible or Fathom get there faster and cheaper.

Are any of these open source?

Plausible (AGPL), Umami (MIT) and Matomo (GPL) publish their code and can be self-hosted for free. Fathom, Simple Analytics and BusinessMCP are hosted only.

Do cookieless tools survive ad blockers?

Better than Google Analytics, because a first-party script on your own domain is not on most blocklists — every tool above supports a custom domain or proxy for exactly that reason. No client-side script is immune, which is why server-side events matter for the numbers that pay you.

Other honest alternatives

Google Analytics 4

Free at any volume and the tool most of these replace — with cookies and a consent banner.

Compare

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, free to 1M events; a different job from web analytics.

Compare

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

Keep reading

Cookieless web analytics, explained First-party analytics that survives ad blockers Consent Mode, without the mystery Website tracking laws by country Google Analytics alternative

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