Best Web Analytics Tools For 2025 (That Aren’t Google Analytics)

Think Google Analytics is your only option? Think again. More and more marketers are moving beyond the industry standard and discovering a world of powerful alternatives and specialized tools that can provide a more complete picture of their website performance, often with more respect for website user privacy.

This article will introduce you to thirteen of the leading contenders, helping you find the right analytics tools to meet your goals.

Who is this for

If you’re a marketer or business owner who wants to leverage data to grow, but you don’t have a huge enterprise budget, this article is your guide.

How I created the list

I’ve hand-picked, tested, and researched a list of web analytics tools that deliver powerful insights without the hefty price tag. These are the platforms I’ve come across time and again over the last ten years, and I’ve personally used many of them in various projects. While my experience with each tool varies – some I’ve used extensively, others for specific tasks – I’m confident you’ll find one that fits your needs. They all have proven track records and strong reputations.

This list is specifically curated for small businesses and SMBs. Each tool offers a free plan to get you started, with most providing affordable paid options if you need more advanced features or higher data limits.

Want to learn more about these tools? Read on!

Best web analytics tools 

Matomo is an open-source alternative to Google Analytics. This means the code is publicly available, and you can even host it on your own servers if you choose. This is the tool we used at Ahrefs until we developed our own tool — it’s featured below so you can try it, too.

Like Google Analytics, Matomo tracks website traffic, user behavior, and marketing campaigns. A key difference is that Matomo emphasizes data privacy and gives you full ownership of your data. It’s a good option to consider if you’re looking for more control and transparency in your web analytics.

Matomo is available in two versions:

• On-Premise: This version is free to download and install on your own web server, giving you complete control over your data and privacy.
• Cloud: This version is hosted on Matomo’s servers and offers a more user-friendly experience with various pricing plans to suit different needs.

Key use cases

When visitors come to your site, they perform all sorts of actions that can show you how effective your website is as a marketing tool.

Matomo will help you answer questions such as:

• Is your website traffic growing or declining?
• Where do your visitors come from?
• Which navigation paths do your visitors use (i.e., how do they find your most important pages)?
• How effective are your digital campaigns?
• How many visitors perform actions that are valuable to your business?
• What are the biggest bottlenecks for conversions and purchases?

Standout feature

Some website events are more important than others: sales, form completions, downloads, specific page visits, etc. To monitor them, you can set up the “Goals” feature.

Matomo allows you to track various data related to your goals. You’ll know how many people completed the goal, where they came from, how performance changes over time, and which channels contribute to the goals the most. You can also assign revenue to your goals for easier ROI tracking.

You can visit Matomo’s live demo to get a feel of the product.

Pricing

You can use the basic features of Matomo for free if you host it on your server. The cloud-hosted version starts at $26/month and depends on your monthly traffic.

You can also get premium add-ons such as A/B testing, funnels, or heatmaps. This is something worth comparing to third-party tools that offer the same functionality.

Countly is a product analytics platform that tracks user behavior across mobile, web, and desktop applications, offering features like event tracking, session recording, crash reporting, push notifications, and A/B testing.

Countly provides a great balance of simplicity and power, offering granular control over data and user access. In addition, it has 10 SDKs and 70+ features, and you have a robust platform for enhancing user experience across web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Key use cases

• Product analytics: Track user actions and analyze product usage data to understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
• User engagement: Track user engagement with features, content, and campaigns to optimize your product and marketing efforts.
• Retention analysis: Analyze user retention rates and identify factors that contribute to churn.
• Crash reporting: Track and analyze app crashes to identify and fix bugs.
• Push notifications: Send targeted push notifications to engage users and promote your product.
• User profiles: Gain a complete view of the user journey with the “User Profiles” feature, which provides granular user data, customizable segmentation, and real-time updates.

Standout feature

Countly’s UX stands out for its clarity and user-friendliness. It’s a welcome change from more complex platforms like GA4, offering a smooth setup and intuitive interface. Despite its simplicity, it offers powerful customization through dashboards, plugins, and access controls.

And it looks so much better than GA4…

Pricing

Countly offers a free Lite version and paid Flex plans (you have to talk to sales to get your quote). See full pricing.

While many marketers know Ahrefs for its powerful SEO capabilities, we now offer more than just that.

Ahrefs helps users improve their search engine rankings through features like keyword research, backlink analysis, site audits, and rank tracking. However, we’ve recently expanded into web analytics with a simple, privacy-first tracking tool (read more about data privacy here).

This makes Ahrefs a good option if you want to combine your SEO efforts with basic website traffic analysis, including real-time data, all within one platform. The new Web Analytics feature can be used for free for up to 1 million events/month and is included in the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

Key use cases

Ahrefs uncovers:

• Keywords your customers are searching for.
• Content ideas from your competitors and top-performing content in your niche.
• Link opportunities that can boost your SEO.
• Your current and historical rankings in Google.
• Technical SEO issues that may hinder your ability to rank.
• Real-time metrics on website visitors.
• Essential website metrics such as unique visitors, visits, and time on page.
• Where your competitors funnel paid traffic, which keywords they bid for, and what ads they use.

Standout feature

Ahrefs excels in competitive analysis, providing insights that go far beyond your own website’s performance. You can just plug an URL Ahrefs’ Site Explorer you can discover how much organic traffic they receive, benchmark against your site, and look into keyword and backlink strategy.

Something I use almost every day for competitor analysis is the visualization of content updates directly on the organic traffic graph. When a competitor experiences a surge in traffic, you can immediately see the content modifications they made, whether it’s a title change, new sections added, or a complete rewrite.

Pricing

Ahrefs starts at $29/month, and you can get two months free if you pay annually. See full pricing.

If you’re just starting out in SEO, Ahrefs offers a range of free tools to help you take your first steps. A notable one is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which allows you to check general web traffic and SEO performance for the sites you own.

Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps you understand what users are actually doing inside your website or app. Think of it as a tool that tracks how people are engaging with your product, how long they’re sticking around, and whether they’re completing the actions you want them to.

Key use cases

• User behavior analysis: Understand how users interact with your product, including their navigation patterns, feature usage, and engagement with content.
• Customer journey mapping: Visualize the customer journey to identify areas for improvement and optimize the user experience.
• Retention analysis: Analyze user retention rates and identify factors that contribute to churn.
• A/B testing: Test different versions of your product or features to identify which performs best.

Standout feature

Amplitude’s AI assistant features are a significant step forward in making product analytics more accessible. The ability to ask questions in plain English with “Ask Amplitude” and receive instant answers, complete with automatically generated charts, drastically reduces the time spent on manual analysis.

If you’re looking to empower your team to make data-driven decisions without needing deep data expertise, Amplitude’s AI capabilities are a compelling reason to consider the platform. It democratizes data and gives you insights faster.

Pricing

Amplitude offers a free plan and paid plans starting at $61 per month ($49 if you pay annually). See full pricing.

Woopra is a powerful customer journey analytics platform that provides valuable insights into customer behavior. Its strengths lie in its ability to track interactions across multiple channels and provide real-time data.

Key use cases

• Customer journey analysis: Track and analyze customer interactions across all touchpoints to understand the complete customer journey.
• Customer segmentation: Segment customers based on their behavior, demographics, and other attributes to personalize experiences and target marketing efforts.
• Trend analysis: Identify trends in customer behavior and product usage to make data-driven decisions.
• Real-Time monitoring: Monitor customer activity in real-time to identify and address issues immediately.

Standout feature

Woopra is known for their journey analytics. Think of journey analytics as a map of your customer’s experience. It shows you every step they take, from their first interaction with your brand to becoming a loyal customer.

By tracking interactions across your website, app, email, and other channels, you can see where customers are getting stuck, what’s working well, and how to improve their experience.

Pricing

Woopra offers a free plan, premium plans start at $49 per month. See full pricing.

Mixpanel is a platform that makes it easy to understand what users are doing on your website or in your app. It lets you track events, group users, analyze funnels, and run A/B tests, all within a clean and visual interface. Mixpanel also integrates with many other tools, so you can easily incorporate the data into your existing workflows.

While Mixpanel does collect user data for analysis, it offers data encryption, access controls, and compliance with privacy regulations like GDPR. It’s a good choice if you want to improve your product based on user behavior without needing a complex setup.

Key Use Cases

• Product analytics: Track user actions and analyze product usage data to understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
• User segmentation: Segment users based on their behavior, demographics, and other attributes to personalize experiences and target marketing efforts.
• Funnel analysis: Analyze user flows and identify drop-off points in conversion funnels to optimize user journeys.
• A/B testing: Test different versions of your product or features to identify which performs best.
• Retention analysis: Analyze user retention rates and identify factors that contribute to churn.

Standout feature: custom buckets

Custom Buckets are a feature in Mixpanel that lets you create new user segments by grouping together existing segments based on shared characteristics.

What’s so great about it? It allows you to effortlessly combine existing user segments into new, more meaningful ones. For example, you could easily group users from Spain, Mexico, and Argentina into a “Spanish Speaking Countries” segment. This might sound simple, but it unlocks powerful insights without requiring you to be a data expert.

Pricing

Mixpanel offers a free plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $20 per month. See full pricing.

Piwik PRO is an analytics suite that provides tools for website analytics, tag management, consent management, and a customer data platform (CDP). It’s designed to help businesses collect and analyze customer data while complying with privacy regulations.

Piwik PRO features customizable dashboards, detailed reports, and various hosting options, including cloud, private cloud, and on-premise.

Key use cases

• Metasite functionality: Analyze data across multiple websites with the metasite functionality, which is perfect for reflecting the complexity of a website’s structure.
• Tag management: Manage and deploy marketing tags to collect data and track marketing performance.
• Customer data platform: Build a unified customer view by collecting and integrating data from various sources.

Standout feature

Piwik PRO’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) connects website analytics data with information from other sources like your CRM and marketing automation platform. This creates a unified customer profile, providing a more complete view of each customer’s interactions with your brand.

For web analytics users, this means richer insights beyond basic website metrics. The CDP enables detailed segmentation based on combined data, personalized website experiences, and more effective marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Piwik PRO offers a free Core plan and paid Enterprise plan. See full pricing.

While primarily known as a CRM, HubSpot has evolved into a comprehensive marketing platform. It stands out for its all-in-one approach, combining analytics, content creation tools, and marketing automation.

This makes it a good choice for businesses looking to streamline their marketing operations and improve collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer service. If you need a platform that integrates various marketing functions and facilitates a unified customer view, HubSpot is worth considering.

Key use cases

If you’re doing lead generation and lead nurturing, you probably can’t go wrong with HubSpot.

Without any coding skills, you can set up a site, start blogging, and create landing pages for lead magnets. Then you can engage your leads in email workflows without the need for another tool.

The analytic capabilities you get in the package aren’t the most advanced on the market, but they’re enough to get a decent insight into your performance.

Standout feature

While testing the analytics features in the free version, I found the dashboard feature super useful. With different features on board, you certainly don’t want to click through the entire tool to find the right report. A customizable dashboard solves that because you get all your important reports in one place.

A quick dashboard I created. Shows data from different tools in one place.

Pricing

You can start with the basic functionality of HubSpot for free. Premium plans start at $18/month (for an annual subscription) and largely depend on your contact list size. See full pricing.

PostHog stands out as an all-in-one, open-source platform for both product and web analytics. It combines traditional web analytics, product analytics, session recording, feature flagging, and A/B testing in a single, developer-friendly solution.

With its comprehensive features, SDKs for various platforms, and integrations with popular development tools, PostHog allows you to track user actions across your website and product, analyze data, and run experiments to optimize the entire user experience.

Key use cases

• Product analytics: Track user actions and analyze product usage data to understand user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
• Session recording: Record and replay user sessions to see how users interact with your product and identify pain points.
• Feature flagging: Control the release of new features and conduct A/B testing to measure their impact on user behavior.
• A/B testing: Test different versions of your product or features to identify which performs best.

Standout feature

While PostHog offers built-in web analytics dashboards, its data warehouse feature takes things a step further. By letting you export your data to platforms like Snowflake or BigQuery, it opens up a world of possibilities for advanced analysis.

This is particularly valuable if you want to combine your website data with other marketing data, such as email or advertising performance. Use cases include building custom reports, performing detailed segmentation, creating more accurate attribution models, and ultimately, gaining a unified view of the customer journey across all your marketing channels.

Pricing

PostHog offers a free plan. Paid plans actually start from $1 and are based on usage. See full pricing.

Unlike general web analytics tools, Visual Web Optimizer (VWO) focuses specifically on A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. It’s a great choice for businesses that want to experiment with different website designs and content to improve user engagement and achieve specific goals, like increasing signups or sales.

Key use cases

Visual Web Optimizer offers everything you’d need to launch experiments on your website:

• A/B and multivariate testing.
• Heatmaps.
• Session recordings.
• Page personalization for audience segments.
• On-site surveys.
• Form filling analysis.

Standout feature

VWO allows you to quickly hop in and test pretty much any kind of idea for improving your website — and that’s obviously great.

But what made an impression on me is how VWO enables you to be scientific and organized about your experiments (which is great for collaboration too).

I could document observations as they happened, regardless of any ongoing tests. When I got an idea of how to address my observations, I could create a hypothesis and link it to any kind of experiment.

VWO also provides a neat planning tool (kanban). I can just leave my hypotheses in the backlog and let someone pick the one that should be tested.

Pricing

VWO offers a free plan. Premium plans start at $190/month for the core tool and depend on the number of users you want to track per month and optional tools. See full pricing.

Hotjar is a website behavior analytics tool that helps businesses understand how users interact with their websites. It provides visual representations of user behavior through features like heatmaps (which show where users click, move their mouse, and scroll), session recordings (which allow you to watch individual user sessions), and feedback tools like polls and surveys.

Hotjar integrates with various marketing and development platforms and is designed to be user-friendly, making it relatively easy to collect and analyze user data.

Key use cases

• Website usability testing: Identify usability issues and areas for improvement on your website by visualizing user behavior with heatmaps and session recordings.
• Conversion rate optimization: Optimize your website’s conversion funnels by understanding user behavior and identifying drop-off points.
• User feedback collection: Gather user feedback through polls and surveys to understand user preferences and identify areas for improvement.
• User experience research: Conduct user research to understand user needs and motivations and identify pain points in the user journey.

Standout feature

Hotjar’s AI for Surveys is a game-changer for anyone who regularly collects user feedback. The AI-powered survey generation is impressively fast and produces relevant, well-phrased questions, eliminating the pain of starting from scratch.

The automatic summaries save hours of analysis time, quickly highlighting key themes and sentiments.

But the real magic is the integration with Engage, allowing you to recruit interview participants directly from insightful survey responses seamlessly.

Pricing

Hotjar offers tiered pricing for its Observe, Ask, and Engage products, ranging from free plans with limited features to enterprise-level options with custom pricing. Paid plans start at $39 per month. See full pricing.

GTmetrix is a website performance testing tool that analyzes a website’s loading speed and provides recommendations for improvement. It uses Google Lighthouse, along with other metrics, to measure a site’s loading time, page size, and number of requests.

GTmetrix also offers important metrics like Core Web Vitals and automated monitoring to help website owners track performance over time. It’s a valuable tool for identifying and addressing website speed issues that can impact user experience and search engine rankings.

Key use cases

Starting from the top, why do you even need to monitor your site speed? There are a couple of reasons:

• Website speed testing: Analyze your website’s loading time and identify performance bottlenecks.
• Performance optimization: Get actionable recommendations to improve your website’s speed and user experience.
• Core Web Vitals: Measure your website’s performance against Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics.
• Monitoring: Track your website’s performance over time and get alerts when issues arise.

Now, why this tool and not just any site speed tool? Here are some good reasons:

• Access to multiple testing locations (so you know how fast your site is in the country/city where your most important users are).
• Simulating different device types.
• Simulating mobile internet and various connection speeds.
• Regular monitoring with alerts.

By the way, you can test any site with this tool, which is useful for agency-side marketers.

Standout feature

Even a free GTMetrix plan allows for automated performance monitoring. You can also set specific conditions for an email alert to trigger.

Pricing

GTMetrix offers a free plan. Premium plans are offered on a monthly and annual basis, starting at $5. See full pricing.

Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool from Google designed to help website owners monitor their site’s performance in Google search results. It provides data on search traffic, keyword rankings, and technical issues that might affect a site’s visibility.

While it’s primarily an SEO tool, GSC can integrate with other web analytics platforms, including Ahrefs, to provide a more complete picture of website performance. It’s an essential tool for anyone looking to improve their website’s presence on Google.

Key use cases

To get data on your performance in Google search–related products straight from the “bot’s mouth.” GSC is the place where you can get the most accurate data on a handful of SEO metrics like website traffic, click-through rates, and index coverage.

On top of that, GSC holds a few unique features:

• Submitting sitemaps.
• Finding crawlability issues.
• Inspecting manual actions.

Standout feature

One of the popular use cases for GSC is using the click-through rate data, found in the “Search results” report.

This metric shows the number of clicks that your web pages received divided by the number of times they were shown. So when you see a keyword ranking high but generating poor CTR, you can see the page that ranks for this keyword and try to optimize its title.

Pricing

Google Search Console is free.

Final thoughts

There are a lot of great options out there, so definitely take some time to explore and see which ones really match your specific needs. Sometimes a combo of a couple of different ones is the way to go. You might use Ahrefs to keep tabs on your SEO and competitors, get essential web metrics, and then something like Hotjar to understand how to improve the experience on your website.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn.