Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover analytics. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Simple Analytics | Statcounter | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $20 | From $18 |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | 30 days |
| API | Yes | Not stated |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Website numbers on a single page
Simple Analytics is one dashboard with no setup behind it, aimed at somebody who wants to know what people read and has no intention of building funnels. No cookies, no consent banner and hosting inside the EU are the three things it leads with. Pageview volume sets the price and extra users cost the same again each. Hobby sites are free if the badge stays on the page.
Our note
The per-user price matching the base price is unusual and makes this expensive for a team of three, so it is at its best for one person. The free hobby tier is a genuine offer rather than a trial, and for a personal site the badge is a fair trade.
A visitor log with a lasting free tier
Statcounter has been counting visitors since before analytics became a discipline, and it still does the thing that made it useful: a live feed of individual visits rather than only aggregates, which is how somebody works out what one specific referral actually did. The free plan keeps two weeks of history for a small site. Paying buys longer retention, more sessions and session replay. It is a visitor log rather than a product analytics suite, and anybody wanting funnels and cohorts is looking at the wrong tool.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Data export |
|---|
| Not stated |
| Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | None |
|---|
| Runs on | Web | Web |
|---|
| Covers | Analytics | Analytics |
|---|
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
|---|
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
|---|
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
|---|
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
|---|
Our note
Use this alongside a modern analytics tool rather than instead of one, because the visitor feed answers a question the others do not and it answers little else. Fourteen days of retention on the free plan is the limit that will push you to pay, sooner than the session count.