A privacy-first Google Analytics alternative
If you want to know how your site is doing without cookies, a consent banner, or sending visitor data far afield, PlainStats is a calm, EU-built alternative to Google Analytics.
What you trade, honestly
Google Analytics is powerful, free at the entry level, and deeply integrated with the rest of Google's ad and marketing stack. If you run large ad campaigns and live inside that ecosystem, it does things PlainStats does not try to. PlainStats makes a deliberate trade: less surface area, no cross-product profiling, and a tool you can explain to your visitors in one sentence.
What you gain
- No cookie banner from your analytics. Cookieless by design. See cookieless analytics.
- No personal data to manage. Aggregate counts only, nothing per-visitor to export or erase.
- EU processing. Built in the EU, processed and stored on EU infrastructure. See EU web analytics.
- A dashboard you read in seconds. Live visitors, sources, pages, countries, devices, in real time.
- Lighter on the page. One small, async script, no consent SDK to wire up.
Is Google Analytics a GDPR problem?
It is more nuanced than a yes or no, and it has changed over time. Several EU regulators raised concerns in 2022 about data transfers to the US, and the legal picture shifted again in 2023. We walk through it on is Google Analytics GDPR-compliant. The short version: a cookieless, EU-processed tool simply has fewer of those questions to answer.
The honest comparison
There is no single best tool, only the right trade for your site. If you need deep ad attribution and Google ecosystem integration, GA is hard to replace. If you want honest traffic numbers with minimal privacy and compliance overhead, that is exactly what PlainStats is for.
See it before you decide
The live demo shows the real dashboard with no signup. You can also read how the tracking works in the docs.
General information, not legal advice. The compliance of any analytics setup depends on your full site, vendors, and jurisdiction.