Web Analytics Tools Compared: A Guide for SaaS Founders

The web analytics market has changed significantly over the past three years. GDPR enforcement has made cookie-based tracking riskier and more complicated. GA4 replaced Universal Analytics in a transition that left many teams confused and looking for alternatives. And a new generation of privacy-first tools has matured enough to be credible replacements for teams that do not need enterprise-scale features.

This comparison covers the five tools that come up most often when founders are evaluating their analytics stack: Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo, and Abner. For each, we cover the use case it is actually built for, how it handles privacy and compliance, what the dashboard experience is like, and who should and should not use it.

How to think about the choice

Before comparing tools, be specific about what questions your analytics needs to answer. The tools in this comparison serve genuinely different use cases, and the right choice depends on your situation rather than on feature checklists.

If you run a content site or a media property and need deep audience segmentation and behavioral funnels, GA4 or Matomo will serve you better than a focused tool. If you run a SaaS product and your most important daily question is "is my MRR growing or not and how is my traffic connected to it," you need a tool that combines both, which means Abner. If you want simple, private, no-configuration traffic numbers, Plausible and Fathom are both good choices.

Google Analytics 4

GA4 is the obvious starting point for most teams because it is free and familiar. But "free" overstates the value in practice. GA4 requires a consent management platform for EU visitors, which adds cost, maintenance overhead, and measurable data loss. Studies on European sites consistently show 20 to 40 percent of visitors declining analytics cookies, which means your reported traffic is structurally lower than your actual traffic.

The platform is powerful. If you need custom event tracking, funnel analysis, cross-device attribution, BigQuery export, and deep integration with Google Ads, nothing in this list competes with GA4 at the free tier. But the user interface is widely considered the most difficult in the category. Reports require significant configuration to be useful. Data sampling applies in Explorations. And the event-based data model, while more flexible than session-based analytics, has a steep learning curve for teams that just want to see their traffic trends.

GA4 is best for: large teams with dedicated analytics resources, sites that need to connect web behavior to ad spend, and products where individual user journey analysis is central to the work.

GA4 is a poor fit for: SaaS founders who want quick answers without configuration, EU-focused businesses that want to avoid consent banners, and teams where the analytics tool needs to be used by non-technical stakeholders without training.

Plausible

Plausible is a privacy-first analytics tool built in the EU, hosted in the EU, and designed explicitly to be GDPR compliant without consent banners. It uses a cookieless approach and does not process personal data, which means it falls outside the scope of GDPR consent requirements for most use cases. The script is under 1KB.

The dashboard is clean and fast. All the standard traffic metrics are visible on a single page: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, top pages, referrers, countries, and devices. Custom events, goals, and funnels are available on paid plans. The tool is opinionated about simplicity, which is a strength for teams that want to install it and use it without training, and a limitation for teams that need segmentation or deeper analysis.

Plausible tracks web analytics only. It has no SaaS metrics, no Stripe integration, no revenue data. If you want to connect traffic to MRR, you are managing two tools and doing the correlation manually.

Plausible is best for: content sites, blogs, and marketing pages where privacy compliance matters and the use case is pure web analytics. Open-source self-hosting is available for teams with the infrastructure to run it.

Fathom

Fathom takes a similar position to Plausible: cookieless, privacy-first, clean interface, compliant without consent banners. The company is Canadian and routes traffic through EU infrastructure for European visitors. The script is small and fast.

Fathom has been around longer than Plausible and has a slightly richer feature set, including spam filtering, custom domains for first-party tracking, email reports, and uptime monitoring. The dashboard covers the same core traffic metrics. Like Plausible, it covers web analytics and nothing more. There is no revenue data, no SaaS metrics, and no integration with Stripe or other billing systems.

The practical difference between Fathom and Plausible is small enough that the choice often comes down to secondary factors: Plausible has an open-source self-hosted option if you want to run your own infrastructure; Fathom does not. Fathom has a longer track record, which matters to teams that have been burned by tools that shut down or pivot. Both are actively maintained and both serve the same core use case well.

Fathom is best for: teams that want an established, fully managed privacy-first analytics tool and prefer not to deal with self-hosting. It is a dependable choice when your only requirement is clean, compliant web traffic data and you want a vendor with a clear long-term commitment to the product.

Matomo

Matomo is the most feature-rich alternative to Google Analytics in this list. It tracks everything GA does, and adds heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing, form analytics, and funnel analysis. It can be self-hosted, which gives you complete data ownership. The on-premise version is free (excluding infrastructure and maintenance costs); the cloud-hosted version is priced based on traffic volume.

The complexity is the trade-off. Matomo's interface and data model are close enough to Universal Analytics that teams migrating from the old Google Analytics can adapt relatively quickly, but there is still significant configuration required before the tool is useful. Self-hosted installations require server maintenance, plugin updates, and database management.

On privacy, Matomo can be configured to be GDPR compliant without consent banners if you enable cookieless tracking and disable specific data collection features. However, the default installation uses cookies and requires consent configuration. Getting it right requires reading the documentation carefully.

Matomo is best for: teams with technical resources who need deep behavioral analytics, want to self-host their data, and are migrating from Universal Analytics. It is a poor fit for founders who want something running in fifteen minutes.

Abner

Abner is built specifically for SaaS founders who want web analytics and revenue metrics in one place. The premise is that for a SaaS product, traffic data without revenue context is only half the picture. You want to see visitors, referrers, and top pages alongside MRR, churn rate, LTV, and trial conversion, on the same dashboard, across the same time range.

The web analytics side is cookieless and GDPR compliant without consent banners. The script is under 2KB. Abner tracks pageviews, unique visitors, referrers, UTM parameters, countries, devices, browsers, and Core Web Vitals automatically. The SaaS metrics side connects to your Stripe account with read-only access and computes MRR (with movement breakdown), ARR, churn rate, LTV, ARPU, and trial-to-paid conversion rate. Google Search Console integration pulls impression, click, and position data directly into the dashboard.

Abner does not offer session recordings, heatmaps, or funnel analysis. If those are requirements, Matomo or a dedicated product analytics tool is the better choice. The trade-off is deliberate: Abner is opinionated about what belongs in a SaaS analytics dashboard and does not try to be everything.

Abner is best for: SaaS founders who want traffic and revenue in one dashboard, teams that want privacy compliance without managing consent banners, and anyone upgrading from a general analytics tool to something purpose-built for SaaS.

Side-by-side comparison

Which tool should you choose

If you run a SaaS product and want traffic analytics, revenue metrics, and Search Console data in one place without consent banners, use Abner.

If you run a content site, blog, or marketing site and only need clean traffic data with no compliance overhead, Plausible and Fathom are both solid choices. Plausible has a strong open-source self-hosted option; Fathom has more mature spam filtering and a longer track record.

If you need session recordings, heatmaps, and behavioral analytics alongside traffic data, and have the engineering resources to self-host and maintain it, Matomo is the most capable option in this list.

If your primary analytics requirement is connecting web behavior to ad spend across Google's ad ecosystem, or if you need BigQuery export and enterprise SLAs, GA4 is the only tool on this list that serves that use case.

You can try Abner free for 14 days with no credit card required. Start your trial here.