Most small businesses have analytics installed and get nothing from it. The dashboard exists, nobody opens it, and when someone does they cannot connect any number to a decision.<\/p>\n
That is rarely a tool problem. It is usually that nobody decided what question the analytics was meant to answer. Pick the question first and the tool choice becomes obvious.<\/p>\n
Analytics tools cluster around four different questions:<\/p>\n
“How many people visit and where from?”<\/strong> \u2014 traffic analytics. GA4, Plausible, Fathom.<\/p>\n “What do people actually do on the page?”<\/strong> \u2014 behaviour analytics. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity.<\/p>\n “Which marketing actually produced revenue?”<\/strong> \u2014 attribution. Harder, and where most small businesses genuinely need help.<\/p>\n “How do users move through my product?”<\/strong> \u2014 product analytics. Mixpanel, PostHog, Amplitude.<\/p>\n Installing a traffic tool when your question is attribution produces a dashboard nobody can act on. That is the most common failure in this category.<\/p>\n Free, ubiquitous, and the default. GA4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data in 2023 \u2014 an important note because a great deal of advice online still describes the old interface and metrics.<\/p>\n GA4’s event-based model is more flexible and considerably less intuitive than what it replaced. Many small businesses find it harder to answer simple questions than before.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> anyone needing free, comprehensive traffic data and Google Ads integration. Watch:<\/strong> a real learning curve, and privacy considerations covered below.<\/p>\n Lightweight, privacy-focused, open source, EU-hosted, and simple enough that a non-analyst can read it. No cookies, which means no cookie banner is required for it specifically.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> content sites, small businesses wanting numbers they will actually look at. Watch:<\/strong> less depth than GA4; no free tier beyond a trial, though self-hosting is free.<\/p>\n Similar proposition to Plausible \u2014 privacy-first, simple, cookie-free, with EU isolation options.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> the same audience. Choose between them on interface preference.<\/p>\n Free, with no meaningful usage limits, offering session recordings and heatmaps. That combination is unusual \u2014 this is genuinely free behaviour analytics.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> anyone wanting to see what users actually do. There is little reason not to install it alongside whatever traffic tool you use.<\/p>\n Heatmaps, session recordings, on-site surveys and feedback widgets. More polished than Clarity with better survey tooling.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> teams doing conversion work who want qualitative feedback alongside recordings. Watch:<\/strong> priced by sessions; Clarity covers much of the same ground free.<\/p>\n Open source, self-hostable, with a hosted option. Full-featured traffic analytics where you own the data outright \u2014 which matters for some compliance positions.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> businesses with data residency requirements or a preference for owning their stack.<\/p>\n Product analytics with session recording, feature flags and experiments, open source and self-hostable, with a generous free tier.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> SaaS and product-led businesses. Watch:<\/strong> overkill for a brochure website.<\/p>\n Event-based product analytics \u2014 funnels, retention, cohort analysis. Built to answer “where do users drop off?”<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> products with user accounts and repeat usage.<\/p>\n Similar territory to Mixpanel, strong on retention and behavioural cohorts.<\/p>\n Free, and the most underused tool on this list. It tells you which queries you actually appear for, your position, your click-through rate, and which pages Google has indexed.<\/p>\n For anyone doing content marketing, this answers more useful questions than GA4 does. Everyone with a website should have this connected<\/strong>, and many small businesses have not.<\/p>\n Free reporting layer that pulls from GA4, Search Console, Ads, Sheets and more into one dashboard.<\/p>\n Suits:<\/strong> anyone who needs a monthly report combining several sources.<\/p>\n Named because it is routinely ignored. Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Mailchimp and your payment processor all report revenue data more accurately than a JavaScript tracker can, because they see the actual transactions rather than inferring them.<\/p>\n If your question is “how much did we sell,” start there, not in GA4.<\/p>\nThe Twelve<\/h2>\n
1. Google Analytics 4<\/h3>\n
2. Plausible<\/h3>\n
3. Fathom Analytics<\/h3>\n
4. Microsoft Clarity<\/h3>\n
5. Hotjar<\/h3>\n
6. Matomo<\/h3>\n
7. PostHog<\/h3>\n
8. Mixpanel<\/h3>\n
9. Amplitude<\/h3>\n
10. Google Search Console<\/h3>\n
11. Looker Studio<\/h3>\n
12. Your platform’s own analytics<\/h3>\n
How They Compare<\/h2>\n