Side-by-side comparison of 15+ analytics free tiers in 2026. Compare PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Plausible, Google Analytics, Umami, and more — event limits, session replays, feature flags, and scaling costs.
Published 2026-04-01 · Not yet reviewed · Figures compiled 2026-04-01, not re-checked since · 2 of 2 figures in the “Pricing Change Timeline” table come from our records for 1,580 developer tools · 15+ analytics services compared
Quick verdict:PostHog is the most generous all-in-one platform — 1M events/month free plus 5K session replays, 1M feature flag evaluations, and experiments. Mixpanel matches with 1M events/month on a polished behavioral analytics UI. Amplitude is the most restrictive of the big three at 10K MTUs free but offers enterprise-grade governance. Google Analytics is unlimited and free but comes with privacy trade-offs and data sampling. For privacy-focused analytics, Plausible and Umami are the leading options (self-hosted free, cloud plans paid).
The all-in-one shift: PostHog has redefined the category by bundling analytics, session replays, feature flags, experiments, and surveys into one platform with a generous free tier. Mixpanel and Amplitude remain focused on behavioral analytics, while the privacy-focused segment (Plausible, Fathom, Umami) targets teams that need GDPR compliance without cookie banners.
Free tier: 1M events/month, 5K session replays, 1M feature flag evaluations, unlimited experiments and surveys. Open-source, self-hostable. The only platform that bundles analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, and surveys into a single free tier. EU and US cloud hosting. Transparent usage-based pricing beyond free tier ($0.00031/event). The free tier resets monthly and unused quota doesn't roll over. Best for teams that want a single platform for product analytics + experimentation.
Free tier: 1M events/month. Polished UI focused on behavioral analytics: funnels, retention, cohorts, user flows. Unlimited data retention on the free plan. No session replay (they partner with other tools). Changed pricing from MTU-based to event-based, simplifying the model. EU data residency available. Powerful query builder and segmentation. Best for teams that want focused behavioral analytics with a refined UI.
Free tier: 10K Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs). The MTU metric means one active user generating 100 events counts as 1 MTU, making it cheaper per-user but the 10K limit is very restrictive for growing products. Session replay available as an add-on (1K replays free). Unlimited data retention. Enterprise-grade governance features even on the free plan. Best for enterprise-leaning teams that value governance and don't expect rapid user growth on the free tier.
Free tier: 10K monthly sessions. Unique auto-capture approach — automatically tracks every click, form submission, and page view without manual instrumentation. Session replay included. 6-month data retention on free plan. Acquired by Contentsquare in 2023. Best for teams that want retroactive analytics without needing to instrument every event upfront.
June.so
Free tier: 1K Monthly Active Users. Auto-generated product analytics reports — activation, retention, active users delivered to your inbox. Segment integration. Built specifically for B2B SaaS with company-level analytics. EU hosting available. Best for early-stage B2B startups that want automated reporting without configuration.
Web Analytics
Page-view and visitor analytics for websites. Simpler than product analytics — focused on traffic, referrers, and engagement metrics.
Free tier: Unlimited events and users. The most widely used analytics platform. GA4 is event-based with 14-month data retention on free plan (vs unlimited on GA360 at $150K+/year). Data sampling kicks in at high volumes. The privacy trade-off: Google uses your analytics data to build advertising profiles. Multiple EU DPAs have ruled GA transfers to US servers non-compliant with GDPR. Requires cookie consent banners in the EU. Many privacy-focused sites are migrating away. Best for teams that prioritize comprehensive free analytics and accept Google's data practices.
Pirsch
Free tier: 10K pageviews/month. Privacy-friendly, cookie-free web analytics. GDPR compliant out of the box. Clean dashboard with referrers, UTM parameters, and conversion goals. Built as a simpler alternative to Google Analytics. Server-side tracking option available. Best for small sites that want basic privacy-friendly analytics without self-hosting.
Privacy-Focused Analytics
Analytics tools designed for GDPR/CCPA compliance without cookie consent banners. No personal data collection, no cross-site tracking.
Pricing: Cloud plans from $9/month (10K pageviews). Self-hosted Community Edition is free and open-source (AGPL). No cookies, no personal data, GDPR compliant without consent banners. Lightweight script (<1KB). Dashboard is clean and intentionally simple. Built-in goal and event tracking. Revenue tracking available. EU-owned and operated (Estonia). Best for privacy-conscious teams that want simple, compliant analytics. Self-host for free or pay for the cloud convenience.
Fathom
Pricing: From $15/month (100K pageviews). No free tier. Privacy-first, cookie-free. Lightweight script. Intelligent bot filtering. EU isolation available. The dashboard is minimal and focused on the metrics that matter. Notable for extreme simplicity — no funnels, no cohorts, just traffic and engagement. Best for businesses willing to pay for premium privacy analytics with zero complexity.
Simple Analytics
Pricing: From $9/month (100K pageviews). No free tier. Cookie-free, GDPR compliant. Mini websites for each referrer source. Tweet analytics for social tracking. AI-powered insights. Notable for transparency — their own dashboard is public. Best for teams that want privacy analytics with social media tracking integration.
All-in-One Platforms
Platforms that bundle analytics with session replays, feature flags, experiments, and more. The "platform play" that's reshaping the analytics market.
PostHog is the only platform offering analytics + session replays + feature flags + A/B testing + surveys in a single free tier. This is its defining advantage. Instead of stitching together Mixpanel (analytics) + FullStory (replays) + LaunchDarkly (flags) + Optimizely (experiments), PostHog does it all. The trade-off: each individual module may not be best-in-class (Mixpanel's behavioral analytics UI is more polished, FullStory's replays are richer), but the integration advantage is substantial. One SDK, one data model, one billing meter.
The bundling advantage: Using separate tools for analytics, replays, and flags typically costs $500–$2,000+/month at growth stage. PostHog's free tier covers all three up to 1M events + 5K replays + 1M flag evaluations. Even the paid tier is dramatically cheaper than buying each tool separately. The catch: you're betting on PostHog's execution across multiple product categories.
Self-Hosted Analytics
Run analytics on your own infrastructure. Unlimited data, full privacy control, zero vendor fees — if you have the ops capacity.
License: MIT (most permissive). A clean, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. Deploys in minutes via Docker or one-click to Vercel/Netlify/Railway. PostgreSQL or MySQL backend. Under 10KB tracking script. Cloud version available with 100K events/month free tier. The easiest self-hosted analytics setup available. Best for developers who want simple web analytics without complexity.
Matomo
License: GPL v3. The most mature Google Analytics alternative. Full-featured: goals, funnels, heatmaps (plugin), session recordings (plugin), SEO reports, ecommerce tracking. PHP + MySQL stack (traditional LAMP deployment). Cloud version exists but has no free tier. 100% data ownership. Used by governments and enterprises for GDPR compliance. Best for organizations that need a full-featured GA replacement with complete data sovereignty.
Countly
License: AGPL v3 (Community Edition). Multi-platform analytics: mobile (iOS, Android, React Native), web, and desktop. Push notifications, crash analytics, user profiles. Strong mobile SDK support. Enterprise edition adds advanced features (revenue analytics, user flows). Best for mobile app analytics with a self-hosted requirement.
The Analytics Cost Trap
Analytics costs look manageable until your product grows. Here's how costs scale from free to enterprise.
Usage Scenario
PostHog
Mixpanel
Amplitude
Google Analytics
Plausible Cloud
500K events/mo
$0 (free)
$0 (free)
Varies by MTUs
$0 (free)
~$9/mo
2M events/mo
~$31
~$24
Custom pricing
$0 (free, sampled)
~$19/mo
10M events/mo
~$450
~$1,000+
Custom ($1,500+)
$0 (free, heavily sampled)
~$69/mo
50M events/mo
~$1,400
Custom ($5,000+)
Custom ($8,000+)
$0 (free, data quality issues)
~$199/mo
100M events/mo
~$2,000
Custom ($10,000+)
Custom ($15,000+)
$0 or GA360 ($150K+/yr)
~$399/mo
The MTU vs event pricing trap: Amplitude charges by Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs), while PostHog and Mixpanel charge by events. One power user generating 100 events counts as 1 MTU on Amplitude but 100 events on PostHog/Mixpanel. For apps with high engagement per user, Amplitude's MTU model is cheaper. For apps with many low-engagement users (e.g., content sites), event-based pricing wins. Know your engagement pattern before choosing.
The session replay add-on trap: Session replay is increasingly essential for debugging and UX research. PostHog includes 5K replays free. Amplitude offers 1K free but charges for more. Mixpanel doesn't offer replay at all — you'd need a separate tool like FullStory ($300+/mo), Hotjar ($80+/mo), or LogRocket ($99+/mo). At growth stage, buying analytics + replay separately typically costs 2–3x what PostHog charges for both bundled.
The Google Analytics "free" trap: GA is free in dollars but costs you in data quality and privacy. Data sampling begins at 500K sessions per property for ad-hoc queries. You don't own the data — Google uses it for advertising. EU regulators have ruled GA non-compliant. The real cost is the cookie consent banner (reducing opt-in rates by 20–40%), compliance risk, and data sampling at scale. "Free" analytics that samples your data isn't really free.
By Use Case
Recommendations by Use Case
Most generous free tier → PostHog
1M events + 5K replays + 1M feature flags free. No other platform matches this breadth. Open-source, self-hostable. The clear winner for startups that want analytics + experimentation in one tool.
Best behavioral analytics → Mixpanel
1M events free with unlimited retention. The most polished UI for funnels, retention, and cohort analysis. Focused on doing behavioral analytics exceptionally well rather than bundling everything.
Unlimited basic web analytics → Google Analytics
Free and unlimited, with the caveat that you're giving Google your data. Best for content sites and marketing teams that need basic traffic analytics and accept the privacy trade-off.
Best privacy-focused → Plausible or Umami
No cookies, no personal data, GDPR compliant without consent banners. Plausible CE and Umami are both free to self-host. Umami also offers 100K events/month free cloud. For paid cloud: Plausible from $9/mo.
Best self-hosted → Umami
MIT license, deploys to Docker/Vercel in minutes, under 10KB script. The easiest path to self-hosted analytics. For full GA replacement: Matomo (more features, more complex).
Enterprise-ready free start → Amplitude
10K MTUs free with enterprise governance, SSO, and unlimited retention. The free limit is low, but the enterprise features are unmatched. Best for companies that know they'll scale to paid and want enterprise governance from day one.
Startup-friendly auto-reports → June.so
1K MAUs free with auto-generated reports. Built for B2B SaaS with company-level analytics delivered to your inbox. Best for early-stage startups that want insights without configuration.
Hidden Costs and Gotchas
Google Analytics free = Google owns your data
GA is free because your analytics data feeds Google's advertising platform. Multiple EU data protection authorities (Austria, France, Italy, Denmark) have ruled GA transfers to US servers non-compliant with GDPR. Using GA requires cookie consent banners in the EU, which typically reduce opt-in rates by 20–40% — meaning you lose data on the most privacy-conscious users.
Amplitude's 10K MTU limit is very restrictive
10K Monthly Tracked Users sounds generous until your product grows. A B2C app that goes viral can burn through 10K MTUs in days. Beyond the free tier, Amplitude's pricing is opaque (custom quotes), and customers report $50K–$200K+/year contracts. The jump from free to paid is one of the steepest in analytics.
Mixpanel has changed pricing models multiple times
Mixpanel previously charged by MTU, then switched to event-based pricing. These changes required customers to re-evaluate their analytics strategy. While the current 1M events/month free is generous, the history of pricing model changes is worth noting for long-term planning. Data portability matters.
PostHog's generous free tier requires self-serve
PostHog's free tier comes with community support only — no dedicated account manager, no SLAs, no priority support. For production-critical analytics, this means you're on your own for debugging data discrepancies, SDK issues, or pipeline problems. The paid plan starts at custom pricing for dedicated support.
Self-hosted "free" = your infrastructure costs + maintenance
Self-hosting Matomo, PostHog, or Umami is free in licensing but not in total cost. PostHog self-hosted requires significant infrastructure (ClickHouse, Kafka, PostgreSQL). Matomo needs PHP + MySQL. Even Umami needs a PostgreSQL database. At 10M+ events/month, infrastructure costs can exceed managed service pricing. Factor in engineering time for updates, backups, and monitoring.
Data retention limits on free plans
PostHog retains data for 1 year on the free plan. Heap retains for 6 months. GA4 retains for 14 months (adjustable to 2 or 14 months only). After the retention period, your historical data is gone. Mixpanel and Amplitude offer unlimited retention on free plans, which is a significant advantage for long-term trend analysis.
Pricing Change Timeline
Recent analytics pricing changes tracked in our index.
Date
Provider
Change
Impact
discovered Sep 30, 2026 · effective date unknown
TraceLog
The free plan now offers 10,000 sessions/month instead of 5,000. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of TraceLog's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
Fivetran Activations
The free tier for Activations now offers 500,000 MAR for connections and 3,500 MAR for Activations. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Fivetran Activations's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
Amplitude
Amplitude renamed its Startup Scholarship "Early Stage Startup Pricing". The first year is still the full Growth plan free for startups with under 20 employees and under $10M raised; year 2 is now 40% off the annual Plus plan, or the free plan. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Amplitude's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective between Mar 11, 2026 and Sep 7, 2026
Tinybird
The free tier now has 1k requests per day instead of unlimited, and the description of the free tier has changed. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
AppFit
The free tier now only allows for 1 Company and 1 Project. The free tier features manual data entry, product journal, and email insights. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Aug 28, 2026 · effective date unknown
Hotjar
The free plan now offers 200k sessions per month, a significant increase from 20,000 sessions. It also includes features like error monitoring, funnels, and 10+ integrations. The free plan also includes a 15-day trial of the Growth plan. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Hotjar's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
HIGH
effective between Mar 14, 2026 and Aug 28, 2026
TraceLog
The free tier now offers up to 5k sessions/month instead of 10k. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Apr 12, 2026 · effective date unknown
Userbird
Domain dead (DNS failure) We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Userbird's rating.
LOW
discovered Apr 12, 2026 · effective date unknown
Seline
No permanent free plan We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Seline's rating.
LOW
discovered Apr 12, 2026 · effective date unknown
Fivetran Activations
Acquired by Fivetran, now Fivetran Activations We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Fivetran Activations's rating.
LOW
discovered Apr 12, 2026 · effective date unknown
UsabilityHub
Rebranded to Lyssna We hold no source for this record, so it does not set UsabilityHub's rating.
LOW
discovered Apr 12, 2026 · effective date unknown
Hotjar
Now part of Contentsquare, free plan changed to 20K sessions (was 2K pageviews/day) We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Hotjar's rating.
LOW
Data Source
How we track this data: the tables on this page were compiled by hand from vendor pricing pages. They do not come from the catalogue behind our search and MCP tools. Prices and limits are for free tiers only — paid tier comparisons use publicly available list prices. Compiled 2026-04-01, not re-checked since. Check data freshness.
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price. The figures in the tables above are from our own records, except for the services whose entry below dates them to a read of the vendor's own page.
Amplitude — We read that on 2026-10-06 from amplitude.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Amplitude as "amplitude" and states "$0"
Google Analytics — the page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read
heap.io — We read that on 2026-09-30 from heap.io, and our check recorded: the page names heap.io as "heap io" and states amounts, none of which we matched to the terms we publish
Mixpanel — We read that on 2026-09-22 from mixpanel.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Mixpanel as "mixpanel" and states "1M events / month" and "10K session replays / month". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-22.
Plausible Analytics — We read that on 2026-10-02 from plausible.io, and our check recorded: the page names Plausible Analytics as "plausible analytics" and states "$9"
PostHog — We read that on 2026-10-06 from posthog.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names PostHog as "posthog" and states "$0". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-06.
Umami — the page we cite for this offer states no amount, tier or rate we can read
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best free analytics service in 2026?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 41 Analytics services in our catalogue, each with the free tier terms. This page compares them on free tier limits, what each charges past them, and lock-in risk; the table above carries the figures side by side. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Which analytics free tier is most generous?
We name no most generous free tier here, because generosity is not one quantity: the columns above measure different things and a tier that leads one trails another.
How do analytics free tiers compare on limits?
Each provider structures free tier limits differently — some cap storage, others cap requests or compute hours. Our comparison table provides exact numbers for each provider. Check the growth cost analysis section to understand what you'll pay when you exceed free tier limits.