See how Simple Analytics delivers cookieless, GDPR-compliant web analytics. Compare pricing plans, features, pros and cons versus Google Analytics.
Simple Analytics is a web analytics platform built around a single premise: you should be able to understand your website traffic without tracking the people who visit it. Founded in 2018 in the Netherlands, the product was created after founder Adriaan van Rossum grew frustrated with the complexity, invasiveness, and consent-banner overhead of Google Analytics.
Instead of cookies, fingerprinting, or persistent identifiers, Simple Analytics aggregates anonymous, non-identifiable traffic data in real time. Because no personal data is collected, most sites running it do not need a cookie consent banner under GDPR or PECR, which is a major reason privacy-conscious founders and EU-based businesses adopt it.
The dashboard intentionally favors clarity over depth: pageviews, unique visitors, top referrers, top pages, device types, and countries are all visible on one screen with no funnel-building or event schema required to get started, though custom events and goals are supported for teams that need them.
Simple Analytics tracks pageviews and visitors without cookies or local storage, using a script that avoids anything that would classify as personal data collection under GDPR. This also means the tool is unaffected by browser cookie-blocking and ad-blocker behavior in many cases, since it does not rely on third-party tracking infrastructure.
Beyond basic traffic counts, the platform supports custom events, goal tracking, UTM campaign reporting, and a public dashboard option so teams can share live stats with stakeholders without giving out login access. An API and data export are available on paid and Enterprise plans for teams that want to pipe data into a warehouse or BI tool.
Simple Analytics also publishes its infrastructure and compliance posture openly, including EU-only hosting, and offers a proxy setup so analytics traffic is served from a business's own domain rather than a third-party one, improving both privacy optics and ad-blocker resilience.
Simple Analytics offers a genuinely free forever plan covering a handful of websites with about 30 days of history, aimed at hobby projects and evaluation.
The paid Self-Serve plan starts at roughly EUR 20 per month and scales with monthly pageview volume; pricing increases as traffic grows, and annual billing includes a discount equivalent to two free months.
An Enterprise plan with custom pricing adds raw data export, SSO, role-based access control, Looker Studio integration, priority support, and help with security or procurement reviews, targeting larger organizations with compliance requirements.
No. Simple Analytics does not use cookies or any persistent identifiers, which is why most websites using it do not need to show a cookie consent banner under GDPR or PECR.
Yes. Simple Analytics is built to comply with GDPR, PECR, and CCPA by not collecting personal data or tracking individuals across sessions, and by hosting data within the EU.
Yes, Simple Analytics offers a free forever plan that covers a small number of websites with about 30 days of history, alongside paid Self-Serve and Enterprise plans.
Paid Self-Serve plans start at roughly EUR 20 per month and scale with monthly pageview volume. Enterprise pricing is custom and available on request.
Simple Analytics was founded in 2018 by Dutch developer Adriaan van Rossum and is headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Simple Analytics avoids cookies and personal data collection entirely, offers a simpler single-page dashboard, and does not require a consent banner, whereas Google Analytics relies on cookies and detailed user-level tracking.
Simple Analytics is offered as a hosted SaaS product with EU-based infrastructure; it is not distributed as self-hosted open-source software.
Common alternatives include Plausible Analytics, Fathom Analytics, and Matomo, all of which also position themselves as privacy-friendly Google Analytics replacements.