Simple Analytics is the radically minimalist take on web analytics. No cookies, no events, just pageviews and referrers. They’ve built a small, beloved product with a Dutch team. The honest comparison:

Where Simple Analytics wins

The dashboard. Simple Analytics built their brand on a single-page minimalist dashboard. If you literally only want pageviews and referrers, it’s the cleanest UX you can get. We have no UI.

Forever-retention. Data kept forever on any paid plan. We’re 1y / 3y / custom.

Brand and maturity. Simple Analytics has been live since 2018, has a loyal customer base, has shipped through every privacy regulation shift. They’re a known quantity.

Pure simplicity. If “I just want pageviews, leave me alone” is your philosophy, Simple Analytics matches it. We can match it too (use only get_overview and top_pages and ignore the other 21 tools), but our existence is because people often want more.

Where we win

Free tier with no card. Simple Analytics has a 14-day trial. We’re free up to 100k hits/month, unlimited sites, no card.

40x more volume at the same price. ~$19/month gets you ~250k pageviews at Simple Analytics versus our 10M hits. If you have any volume above hobby-level, the math shifts dramatically.

MCP primary interface. You ask in chat, you get an answer. Simple Analytics has an API for programmatic access, but no chat interface.

Custom events as a first-class concept. Simple Analytics’s events story is limited. You can track them but the workflow is constrained compared to ours. Our ingest endpoint accepts POST /event directly from your backend (webhooks, cron, server-side conversions); first-party Ruby/npm wrappers are on the Pro roadmap.

AI crawler visibility. Simple Analytics filters bots; we surface them across 8 classes.

Deploy-regression tracking on the Pro roadmap. GitHub Action plus MCP tools to flag traffic anomalies caused by a deploy. Simple Analytics has nothing similar.

When you should pick Simple Analytics

  • You only want pageviews and referrers. Anything more is noise to you.
  • You’re aesthetically committed to a single-page dashboard.
  • You don’t use Claude/ChatGPT as a daily workflow.

When you should pick us

  • You spend daily time in Claude/ChatGPT/Cursor.
  • You need custom events from your backend (webhooks, conversions, server-side).
  • You may spike or grow. 40x more hits per dollar.
  • You want bot/AI-crawler breakdown.

What’s not a real difference

  • Both privacy-first, cookieless, EU-hosted.
  • Both target the indie/SaaS/blog market.

Try it

Sign up free, 100k hits/month, no card.