Most people looking for this have already decided. The cookie banner, the sampling, the interface that needs a course to operate, or a legal team asking where EU visitor data ends up, the same calculation behind the hidden cost of sign in with Google. What they want is the next step, not more argument.
Before that, the honest part these articles skip: leaving Google Analytics costs you something.
You lose the ad integrations. If you run Google Ads and rely on conversion import, nothing here replaces that cleanly. You lose cross-domain tracking in most cases. You lose free, unlimited scale, because someone now pays for the storage, and that someone is you. And you lose your history the moment you stop, unless the tool you move to can import it.
I should also say up front that I build one of the plugins below. Vireo Analytics is mine. I’ve tried to be useful about where it loses, because a roundup where the author’s own plugin wins everything is worth nothing to you.
The Fork That Decides Everything Else
Every option splits one of two ways, and this matters more than any feature list.
Self-hosted means the data sits in your WordPress database on your own server. Nothing leaves. No monthly fee. The cost is that your database grows, and on a busy site that growth needs managing like everything else that touches performance.
Hosted means someone else stores it and you pay monthly. Your site stays light, the dashboards are usually better, and you’ve swapped one third party for another. Smaller and more honest than Google, but still a third party, and still an outbound request on every pageview.
If your reason for leaving is privacy or compliance, self-hosted is the only option that fully answers it. If your reason is that GA is unusable, hosted is probably the better product.
What Actually Matters When You Choose
Four things decide whether you’ll still be using this in a year.
Does it need a consent banner? The answer depends on whether it sets cookies and whether it stores anything that identifies a person. Several of these use no cookies and hash visitor identity with a salt that rotates, which in most readings means no banner. Check the specific claim rather than the marketing line.
Does it survive your page cache? This is the one that silently breaks. If your pages are served from a static cache or a CDN, a tracker that counts on the PHP side will miss most of your traffic. Anything JavaScript-based handles it; anything server-side needs checking against your setup.
What does it do with bots? This is where the numbers actually come from. Analytics tools draw the line between human and machine in completely different places, and that single decision is the difference between a tool reporting a thousand visitors and one reporting two thousand for the same day. Ask what it excludes and whether it will tell you what it excluded.
Can you bring your history? Most of these start counting from zero the day you install them. If the last three years matter to you, that narrows the field fast.
The Options
Statify is the minimal end. German-made, no cookies, no personal data, a chart of pageviews and a list of referrers. It’s the right answer if you want a number and genuinely nothing else, and it’s the wrong answer the moment you want to know which post is working.
Koko Analytics is the low-overhead choice for busy sites. It buffers hits and writes them in batches, so it stays cheap under traffic. Good dashboard, sensible defaults, self-hosted. If your priority is a site that doesn’t buckle and numbers you can trust, start here.
Burst Statistics has the fuller dashboard of the self-hosted set, with goals and some performance data, and a free tier that’s genuinely usable. It’s heavier than Koko, and the upsell to Pro is present throughout.
Independent Analytics is aimed at people who want something closer to a product than a plugin, with a clean interface and a paid tier for the deeper reporting. Worth a look if the free self-hosted options feel too spare.
Matomo is the serious one. It’s the closest thing to GA’s actual depth, self-hosted or cloud, and it’s what you pick when you need segments, funnels and attribution rather than a traffic chart. The cost is operational: run it properly and it’s infrastructure, not a plugin.
Plausible and Fathom are the hosted answer. Both are small, privacy-first companies with better dashboards than anything self-hosted, both cost money monthly, and both are external services. If you want to stop thinking about this and the fee is fine, they’re the least regrettable purchase on this page.
Vireo Analytics is mine, and it’s built for one specific situation: you’re leaving GA, you want the history to come with you, and you want to see what’s actually happening to your content now.
It imports your Google Analytics 4 history into your own database, so the chart doesn’t start at zero. It pulls your Search Console queries in beside your traffic, so the search terms Google strips from the referrer are visible in the same place. It measures Core Web Vitals from real visitors instead of a test run. And it reports what bots took rather than discarding them, split by category, including what AI crawlers requested against how many readers the assistants actually sent back. Nothing else on this list will tell you that.
No cookies, nothing leaves your server, and it is free on wordpress.org, where install counts are their own strange game.
Where Each One Is the Wrong Choice
Statify is wrong if you’ll ever want to know which post earned the traffic.
Koko is wrong if you want goals, vitals or search data. It’s deliberately narrow.
Burst and Independent Analytics are wrong if you want the deeper reporting without paying, because that’s where both of them put it.
Matomo is wrong if nobody on your side wants to own infrastructure.
Plausible and Fathom are wrong if the reason you’re leaving Google is that you don’t want visitor data on someone else’s servers, because that’s still what’s happening.
Vireo is wrong if you want a large ecosystem and a support team, because it’s new and it’s one person. It’s also wrong if you want the absolute lightest possible tracker, since Koko’s is smaller. And if you have no GA history to bring and no interest in search or AI traffic, you’re paying attention to features you won’t use, and Koko or Statify will serve you better.
Picking
If you want the least thinking: Plausible or Fathom, and pay.
If you want self-hosted and simple: Koko, or Statify if even Koko is more than you need.
If you need GA’s actual depth: Matomo, and budget the time.
If you’re moving off GA and want your history, your search queries and a view of what AI is doing to your content, in your own database and without a banner: that’s what I built Vireo for.
Vireo Analytics on WordPress.org
Related
Hola Jean.
Estoy intentando tener un sitio web “Google-free” y creo que ya lo he conseguido.
Hoy he empezado a usar tu plugin de estadísticas después de probar otros que, efectivamente, tienen todos esos problemas que describes en el post.
Me parece que Vireo Analytics hace simple y exactamente lo que yo necesito.
Pero, siempre hay un pero 🙂 desde el minuto uno me he encontrado con tráfico desde China que no es detectado por el plugin y me gustaría saber si sería posible añadir una casilla bajo el apartado Ajustes -> Geolocalización para poder tratar TODO el tráfico procedente de los países seleccionados como “tráfico basura”.
Gracias, en cualquier caso por distribuir Vireo Analytics tal y como está ahora, que ya es una contribución admirable.
Saludos desde Granada.
Hola Mauricio,
Ya está hecho. Acabo de publicar la versión 0.7.2 con lo que pedías: en Configuración, en el apartado Geolocalización, hay un campo donde pones los códigos de país de dos letras, uno por línea. El tráfico que venga de ahí se descarta en lugar de contarse, igual que ocurre con una IP excluida.
Tenías razón en el diagnóstico. El filtro de bots solo detecta a los que se identifican como tales en el user agent, y eso deja fuera justo lo que estabas viendo.
Un detalle práctico: hace falta que el país se pueda determinar, así que funciona si tu alojamiento ya lo resuelve por su cuenta (Cloudflare y similares) o si tienes instalada la base de datos de geolocalización que aparece en esa misma sección. Si no, no hay país contra el que comparar.
Se actualiza desde el panel de complementos como cualquier otra versión.
Gracias por probarlo y por tomarte la molestia de explicar el problema con detalle. Así es mucho más fácil arreglarlo.
Un saludo,
Jean