Picking a tool?Read the honest version.

Free, everywhere, and built around advertising. The default choice, which is exactly why the trade deserves a close read.

• You need free at any scale. GA4 costs nothing at volumes juuna charges real money for.
• You want session replay, heatmaps and Core Web Vitals in the same tool as your traffic. GA4 offers none of them.

Excellent lightweight web stats: a sub-kilobyte script, no cookies, open source. If counting visits is the whole job, it wins.

• You want the lightest possible script and clean web stats, nothing more.
• You need to watch sessions, not just count them. Masked session replay and click, scroll and attention heatmaps are on every plan.

The everything-platform: analytics, replay, flags, experiments and a warehouse, metered by usage. Powerful, and a lot to hold.

• You want feature flags, A/B experiments or surveys in the same platform as analytics. juuna does none of those.
• You want a bill that reads the same every month.

The veteran of owning your analytics: open source, feature-rich, self-hostable. On-premise control, at the price of operating it.

• Open source is a requirement. Matomo’s code is public and auditable, and you can run it on your own hardware, on your own terms, for free.
• You want the dedicated-server model without the job. Self-hosting Matomo means owning upgrades, backups, scaling and security patching; a juuna instance is all of that, done for you.

Privacy-first web stats with a long track record, built deliberately lean. For a marketing site, the leanness is the point.

• You want traffic numbers and nothing else, on a dashboard you can read in ten seconds. Fathom is built deliberately lean, and the leanness is the product.
• You need to see sessions, not just count them: masked session replay and click, scroll and attention heatmaps on every plan.

Open-source web analytics, genuinely lightweight: free if you run it yourself, clean to read, with a cloud when you would rather not.

• Free and open source is the brief. Self-hosted Umami costs a server and nothing else, and the code (MIT) is yours to read.
• You want the own-server model without becoming the operator. A juuna instance is provisioned, patched and backed up for you, and it is still hardware nobody else shares.

The reference tool for event analytics: cohorts, retention and flows at real depth, priced by volume. For a data team, the deeper instrument.

• You have a data team and depth is the point: cohort definitions, behavioural segmentation, retention analysis with real analytical teeth. Mixpanel is the deeper tool, full stop.
• You want the everyday trio in one tool: traffic analytics, funnels and session replay, without assembling a stack.

The household name for session replay, heatmaps and feedback, now part of Contentsquare. Where teams first learn what watching a session is worth.

• You want feedback where your replays are: surveys, polls and interview tools are Hotjar territory, and juuna has no equivalent of them.
• You want the analytics too. juuna is traffic, funnels and retention in the same tool as replay and heatmaps, so one script does the work of two.