Statcounter

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.

Basic is free forever, covering 5,000 sessions a month, fourteen days of retention, the dashboard, trend charts, the real-time visitor feed and basic email reports, with no session recordings. Premium is $18 a month for 20,000 sessions and adds landing page analysis and replay, with a further tier at $28. Yearly billing saves 10 percent. Everything can be trialled for 30 days without a card.

Somebody running a small site who wants to see what one particular referral did, visit by visit, which the aggregate-first tools make surprisingly hard. The free plan is a genuine long-term option under 5,000 sessions a month. Anybody wanting funnels, cohorts or product analytics is looking at a visitor log, and should be looking at PostHog or Matomo instead.