Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics is a Netherlands-based, EU-hosted analytics service that takes the privacy position further than most peers: it sets no cookies (or any browser storage), does no fingerprinting, and states that it does not collect or store IP addresses at all — rather than pseudonymizing identifiers with hashes. What it stores per pageview is deliberately narrow: timestamp, anonymized user agent (version numbers truncated), URL without query strings, referrer, UTM parameters, device and viewport dimensions, language, time on page, and scroll depth in 5% increments. Country is derived from the visitor’s timezone, not their IP — so geography is coarser and more approximate than IP-geolocated tools.

The data model has one consequence you must understand before adopting it: with no visitor identifier of any kind, “unique visitors” is a referrer heuristic, not a real count. A pageview is counted as unique when there is no referrer (direct traffic) or the referrer is an external hostname; internal navigation is not. That means a regular reader who arrives directly every day counts as a new unique each visit, and your numbers will not reconcile with cookie-based tools like GA4. It also rules out funnels, retention, session stitching, and any visitor-level analysis by design. Note too that by default it collects nothing at all from visitors with Do Not Track enabled, so that segment is simply invisible.

Implementation is a single script, with a documented no-JavaScript fallback, AMP support, CSP and SRI guidance, and a proxying option to reduce ad-blocker losses. Events cover automated detection (outbound links, downloads), custom events, and a server-side option. Getting data out is reasonable for the category: a stats and export API, email reports, and connectors for Google Looker Studio, Power BI, and CloudQuery for warehouse export, plus platform guides for Next.js, WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Ghost. There is no self-hosted edition.

Pricing is simple: a free-forever plan capped at 30 days of history (fine for evaluation, not for year-over-year reporting), Self-Serve from $20/month sized by monthly pageviews, and a custom Enterprise tier that adds raw data access, SSO, role-based access, and traffic-recovery proxying.

Use it when you want the smallest possible privacy and compliance surface with EU residency, a consent-banner-free deployment, and are content with top-line traffic and event reporting. Look past it when you need funnels, segmentation, visitor-level analysis, uniques you can defend as actual people, or self-hosting.