Best Google Analytics Alternatives, Based on What Businesses Actually Use

Most roundups of Google Analytics alternatives are opinion pieces: a writer's ranked list of tools they like, with no way to tell whether real businesses actually use any of them. We checked directly. Stackra's corpus covers 1.2 million verified US small business websites, built from a monthly crawl with automated technology detection, so we can see which analytics tools are actually installed on real business sites, not which ones get the most marketing budget.

What businesses actually install instead of Google Analytics

Among sites in the corpus running a non-Google analytics tool, here is the real breakdown by install count.

Microsoft Clarity is the most common pick, and it is not actually a Google Analytics replacement

Clarity is free, made by Microsoft, and by far the most installed tool on this list. But it does one thing: heatmaps and session recordings, watching where people click and how far they scroll. It does not report traffic sources, conversions, or pageview trends the way Google Analytics does. Most businesses running Clarity are running it alongside Google Analytics, not instead of it. If you want to see how people actually use your site, Clarity is genuinely useful and free. If you want a real GA replacement, look at the next three.

Matomo: the closest like-for-like replacement

Matomo is the most installed genuine Google Analytics alternative, 14,242 sites in this corpus alone. It reports the same core metrics as GA (traffic sources, pageviews, conversions, funnels) and can be self-hosted, which matters if data ownership or GDPR/CCPA compliance is the reason you are looking to switch. The tradeoff is setup: self-hosting means running your own server, and even Matomo's cloud tier costs more than Google Analytics' free tier.

Plausible: built for people who want out of Google's data pipeline entirely

Plausible is smaller in this corpus (2,964 sites) but shows up disproportionately on content and media sites. It is a paid, privacy-first tool: no cookies, no cross-site tracking, a single simple dashboard instead of GA's sprawling report list. The appeal is specifically for site owners who want traffic numbers without running any Google script on their page at all.

Mixpanel and Amplitude: built for product analytics, not marketing analytics

Mixpanel and Amplitude both measure user behavior inside a product (which features get used, where users drop off in a signup flow) rather than marketing-style traffic reporting. They show up here mostly on entertainment and digital-product-style businesses, not brick-and-mortar SMBs. One data quirk worth noting: Amplitude concentrated unusually heavily in restaurant sites in this corpus, which looks less like restaurants independently choosing a product-analytics tool and more like a restaurant platform bundling it by default. Worth knowing if you see it flagged on a site and assume someone made an active choice.

How we got this data

Every figure above comes from Stackra's own corpus: 1.2 million verified US small business websites, built from HTTP Archive's monthly crawl and automated technology detection that identifies analytics tools by matching known code patterns on each page. A tool only counts if its tracking code is actually present and detectable, so this reflects real installs, not survey responses or vendor-reported customer counts.