The privacy-first analytics category has gotten crowded. Plausible. Fathom. Simple Analytics. Pirsch. Matomo. PostHog. Microsoft Clarity. Each one solves part of what a founder actually needs from website analytics in 2026, and most of them solve it well.
We compared them against each other for the analytics stack we recommend to portfolio companies. Clicky won.
It won on features, pricing, privacy, and detail. Here’s the case.
What Clicky Actually Does
Clicky positions itself as a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative used on more than one million websites. No personal data collected. No tracking cookies. No cookie banners required. Aggressive bot and referrer-spam filtering, which alone puts it ahead of GA4 for anyone whose traffic numbers have been silently corrupted by bot inflation for the last three years.
Then come the features Plausible and Fathom do not have. Real-time visitor logs, session by individual session. Proxy tracking that survives ad blockers. Custom data logging. Segmentation that does not require a sampling disclaimer. Heatmaps. AI traffic categorization. Uptime alerts.
Read that list back. It is the full GA4 feature surface plus heatmaps plus uptime monitoring, minus the cookies, minus the data-residency questions, minus the GA4 interface that everyone hates.
The Pricing
Free plan. Pro at $9.99 a month covering 10 sites and 30,000 daily pageviews. Pro Plus at $14.99 a month adds heatmaps and uptime monitoring. Pro Platinum at $19.99 a month for heavier use.
Plausible’s cheapest paid plan is roughly the same price for a single site at lower volume. Fathom is similar. Matomo Cloud starts higher and scales harder. Heatmap tools alone, Hotjar and Lucky Orange in particular, run $30 a month or more on their own.
A founder running five marketing sites at $20 a month with Clicky gets real-time analytics, heatmaps, uptime alerts, and bot filtering on one bill. The same founder on the privacy-first stack is paying for Plausible plus Hotjar plus an uptime tool and getting less visibility.
That is a real cost advantage for early-stage companies that need to understand visitor behavior across multiple landing pages without setting fire to their tools budget.
When Clicky Is the Right Answer
It is the right answer if you want any of the following. Real-time visitor analytics. Visitor-level detail rather than aggregate counts. Affordability across multiple sites. Heatmaps without a separate vendor. Hard bot filtering. More detail than Plausible and Fathom give you.
It is the wrong answer if you are shipping a personal blog and want a single dashboard with one number on it. Plausible was built for that and does that one thing well.
For most early-stage portfolio companies, the use case is closer to the first list. They are running a marketing site, a product page, a docs site, a blog, and a couple of campaign landers. They want to see who is on the site right now, where they came from, what page they bailed on, and whether the form is broken. Clicky answers all of those questions in one tool for less than the price of one Hotjar seat.
What We Tell Founders
Install Clicky. Pro Plus tier. Run it alongside whatever else you are using for the first thirty days. Compare the bot-filtered traffic numbers to GA4. Compare the real-time visitor stream to anything you are using now. Watch a heatmap of your pricing page on a Friday afternoon.
If you do not see something you could not see before, downgrade to free or cancel. We have yet to see a founder do either.
Google Analytics 4 is the obvious answer. The privacy-first tools are the obvious anti-answer. Clicky is the actual answer.