Best privacy-friendly analytics plugins for WordPress
A list like this written by a vendor is usually worthless, so here is the conflict of interest first: I make one of these. Honest Analytics is on the list and I have tried to write the rest of it the way I would want somebody else to write about mine.
Where another tool is the better answer, it says so.
What “privacy-friendly” has to mean here
To make the list, a plugin has to keep visitor data on your own infrastructure and avoid building durable cross-site profiles. That rules out anything that ships data to an advertising company by default, and it deliberately includes tools that differ a lot in scope.
Four questions separate them, and they are the ones worth asking whichever you choose:
- Where does the data physically live?
- What identifies a returning visitor, and how long does that identifier survive?
- Is the IP address stored?
- Can you read the code?
Koko Analytics
The minimal one. Free, open source, data in your own database, can run without cookies, and adds under a kilobyte to your pages. Pageviews, visitors, top pages and referrers, and it is unembarrassed about that being the whole thing. A paid tier adds countries, technology, email reports, campaigns and events.
Pick it if you want the smallest possible thing that answers “how many people read this”. If those four numbers are your four numbers, the rest of this page is noise and you should install Koko.
Independent Analytics
The generous free tier. A WordPress plugin, data in your own database, no cookies, and an unusually complete free version: geography, devices, referrals, filtering and exports are all in it. Pro adds real-time, campaigns, click tracking, ecommerce and form integrations, and cross-day visitor journeys.
It identifies returning visitors from the IP address and user agent, which is a durable identifier. Whether that is the right trade is a judgement about your site rather than something I should make for you.
Pick it if you sell things and want WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads reporting, or you want form tracking, or country reporting matters and you would rather not pay for it.
Matomo for WordPress
The full platform. Runs inside WordPress, stores data in your WordPress database, and brings a mature analytics product with it: segments, custom dimensions, visitor profiles, ecommerce, plus paid heatmaps, session recordings and form analytics.
It is honest in its own documentation that this costs resources - it recommends 256MB of memory and suggests high-traffic or multisite installations use its cloud instead.
Pick it if you need the depth, or you want a like-for-like GA4 replacement including the parts most sites never use, or you already know Matomo.
Plausible
The hosted one. Not a WordPress plugin in the meaningful sense: it is a service, your data goes to its servers, and you read it on its dashboard. Cookieless, simple, well designed, with bot filtering that excludes tens of thousands of data-centre IP ranges - something no plugin running on your own server realistically matches.
Self-hosting is possible and is a separate application to run, not a plugin.
Pick it if your sites are not all WordPress, or you want one dashboard across many properties, or you want somebody else responsible for uptime and backups.
Honest Analytics
Mine, so read this part sceptically. A WordPress plugin, data in your own database, cookieless with an identity salt overwritten every 24 hours, so unique visitors are daily estimates and there is no cross-day journey at all. Free edition includes real-time, the hour-by-day heatmap, per-page detail, device and browser breakdowns, and imports from GA4, WP Statistics and Independent Analytics. Pro adds campaigns with a choice of attribution model, countries resolved locally, events including scroll depth and outbound clicks, form submissions from the four common form plugins, completed WooCommerce orders with refunds netted off, goals, funnels, scheduled email reports, and crawler reporting that names AI bots individually.
Do not pick it if you need session recordings or heatmaps, cross-day visitor journeys, a network-wide dashboard across many sites, ecommerce beyond WooCommerce, or multi-currency revenue. It does none of those.
Choosing without reading all of that
- Smallest thing that works: Koko Analytics.
- Free tier that covers the most ground: Independent Analytics.
- Most capable, if your server can take it: Matomo.
- Not all your sites are WordPress: Plausible.
- You want the privacy limits to be structural, and crawler reporting: this one.
Whichever you pick, run it alongside your existing tool for a month before switching. The numbers will disagree, which is normal, and you want to see the size of the gap while you can still compare.