I build one of the four plugins below. Vireo Analytics is mine, it’s the newest and smallest of them by a wide margin, and you should read everything here with that in mind. I’ve been specific about where the other three beat it, because a comparison where the author’s own plugin wins every row is worth nothing to you.
All four are self-hosted. Your visitor data stays in your own database, and I checked the code of all four for outbound endpoints rather than taking the marketing copy on trust: none of them ship your visitors anywhere.
That’s the easy part. Three months in you’ll want to ask something the plugin can’t answer, and by then your data is already shaped by what it chose not to record.
| Koko | Burst | Independent | Vireo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On WordPress.org since | 2019 | 2022 | 2022 | 2026 |
| Ratings | 243 | 184 | 166 | 1 |
| PHP floor | 7.4 | 8.0 | 8.0.30 | 7.4 |
| Imports your GA history | no | no | no | yes |
| Reports what bots took | no | no | discards them | yes, by category |
| Search Console queries | no | yes | no | yes |
| Cookies | optional, on by default | no | no | no |
The ratings row is the one to take seriously. Koko has been listed since 2019 and has the most of the four. Mine has one, from one person, and no track record at all.
What Each One Is For
Koko Analytics is the one to beat on overhead. It buffers hits and writes them in batches rather than doing a database write per pageview, which is why it stays cheap under traffic. Its tracker goes in inline, so it adds no extra script request to your pages. If your priority is a plugin that won’t become a performance problem, start here.
Burst Statistics has the fullest free dashboard of the four, and it’s the most immediately impressive when you first open it. It also pulls your Search Console queries in beside your traffic, which is a genuinely useful thing almost nobody else does. The trade is that it’s the most aggressive about the upgrade path, and you’ll meet the Pro prompts regularly.
Independent Analytics feels the most like a product and the least like a plugin. Clean interface, paid tier for the deeper reporting. If you’ve looked at Koko and wanted more, this is the natural next stop.
Vireo Analytics is mine, and it’s built for one situation: you’re moving off Google Analytics and you don’t want to start from zero, which I went through in more depth in my roundup of the alternatives. It imports your GA4 history into your own database, and it reports what bots took rather than throwing them away, including what AI crawlers requested against how many readers the assistants sent back. If you’re mid-migration and three years of history matters, that’s the case it was built for.
The Four Questions That Decide It
Ask these before you install anything. They’re what you’ll care about in six months.
Can you bring your history?
Most self-hosted analytics plugins start counting the day you activate them, and they’re upfront about it. Burst says plainly that historical data from other plugins can’t be imported. Independent Analytics answers the same question with a flat no in its own FAQ. Vireo imports GA4. If your history doesn’t matter to you, skip this one entirely.
What does it do with bots?
Every tool draws the human/machine line somewhere different. That one decision is why two plugins report a thousand and two thousand visitors for the same day. Most of them discard bot traffic silently, and Independent Analytics says so directly: it ignores all self-identifying bots. That’s a defensible choice, and it also means you never see what was excluded or what it cost you.
Does it survive your page cache?
If your pages are served from a static cache or a CDN, a tracker that counts on the PHP side misses most of your traffic and nothing tells you. Check the tracking method against your own stack rather than assuming, the same way you would with anything else that touches performance, because this one fails without an error.
Do you need a consent banner?
Mostly this comes down to cookies, and here the four differ more than the marketing suggests. Burst, Independent and Vireo set none. Koko can run without them, but its default tracking method is a cookie, and you have to go and change it. Read the specific claim rather than the tagline, and check it against your own jurisdiction.
Where Each One Is the Wrong Choice
Want goals, Core Web Vitals or search data? Koko does none of it, deliberately, and says so.
Burst and Independent Analytics both put the deeper reporting behind the paid tier, which is fine as a business model and worth knowing before you invest a month of data in either. Both also need PHP 8, so genuinely old hosting rules them out.
Vireo is wrong in more ways, and they’re worth stating plainly. It’s new, with a tiny fraction of the installs the others have, so you’re trusting a much shorter track record. It’s one person, so there’s no support team. Koko’s tracker is lighter. Burst’s dashboard is better designed, and if Search Console data is what you’re after, Burst does that too and has done it for longer. If you’ve got no Google Analytics history to bring across and no interest in what crawlers are doing to your content, you’re paying attention to features you’ll never use, and Koko will serve you better.
How to Choose
Lowest overhead on a busy site: Koko.
Best free dashboard, and Search Console without paying: Burst.
Most polished, and you’ll pay for the depth: Independent Analytics.
Moving off Google Analytics with history you want to keep, and curious what AI crawlers are taking: that’s the one I built. It’s what runs on this site, where install counts are their own strange game.
One last thing about how to read any comparison like this, mine included. I built Vireo around those four questions, so of course it answers them well. Someone who cares most about overhead and a long track record would ask different ones, and Koko would win theirs. The questions are the argument, not the scores.
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