Honest Analytics vs Independent Analytics
Pick Independent Analytics if: you sell through something other than WooCommerce or in more than one currency, you want click tracking on arbitrary elements, or you need visitor journeys that span days.
Independent Analytics is the closest competitor by shape: a WordPress plugin, data in your own database, no external service, a generous free tier, and a paid tier for the deeper reporting. It is on over a hundred thousand sites and it is well liked. Honest Analytics can also import from it, which should tell you it is taken seriously here.
There is one difference that matters more than the feature lists, and it is worth understanding before anything else.
How each one recognises a returning visitor
Neither plugin uses cookies. Both still have to answer “is this the same browser as five minutes ago”, and they answer it differently.
Independent Analytics creates an identifier from the visitor’s IP address and user-agent string. That is a common and reasonable approach: it needs no cookie, and it is how a lot of server-side analytics works.
Honest Analytics hashes the address and user agent together with a random salt that is overwritten in place every 24 hours. Not rotated and archived. Overwritten. Once it is gone, yesterday’s identifiers cannot be recomputed by anybody, including someone holding both the database and the original address, because the key no longer exists. The address itself is never written down at any point: it exists as a variable inside one function, gets hashed, and is gone.
The practical consequence is a limitation, and it is deliberate. Unique visitors here are daily estimates. Somebody who reads you on Monday and again on Thursday counts once on each day. There is no cross-day unique figure and no returning-visitor rate, because those numbers cannot be produced honestly from this model.
An IP-and-user-agent identifier can answer questions this cannot. It is also a more durable identifier, and whether that matters to you is a judgement about your own site and your own visitors rather than something a comparison page should decide for you.
Side by side
| Honest Analytics | Independent Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Data in your WordPress database | Yes | Yes |
| Cookies | None | None |
| How a returning visitor is recognised | IP and user agent hashed with a salt destroyed every 24 hours | IP and user agent |
| Is the IP stored | Never written down at any point | Used to derive the identifier |
| Cross-day visitor journeys | No, by design | Paid |
| Real-time view | Free | Paid |
| Countries | Paid | Free |
| Devices and referrers | Free | Free |
| Export | Free, CSV | Free, CSV and PDF |
| Attribution model choice | Paid | Not offered |
| Campaigns and UTM | Paid | Paid |
| WooCommerce | Paid: orders, revenue and refunds | Paid: broader ecommerce, more platforms |
| Form tracking | Paid: Contact Form 7, Gravity, WPForms, Ninja | Paid: 20+ form plugins |
| Click tracking on any element | Not offered | Paid |
| Crawler reporting | Paid | Not offered |
| Licence | One-off, with an optional renewal | Annual, or a lifetime option |
Free editions, compared
Independent Analytics has an unusually generous free tier: geography, devices, referrals, filters and CSV or PDF export are all in it. Real-time and UTM campaigns are Pro.
Honest Analytics puts real-time in the free edition, along with the hour-by-day heatmap, content grouped by post type, taxonomy and author, per-page detail and page comparison, and imports. Locations and campaigns are Pro here.
So the free tiers overlap heavily and disagree about two things in particular: real-time is free here and paid there; geography is free there and paid here. If either of those is the report you would actually open, that is your answer and the rest of this page does not matter.
Where Independent Analytics is the better choice
- You sell through something other than WooCommerce. Its Pro tier covers Easy Digital Downloads, SureCart, FluentCart and PaidMembershipsPro as well. This covers WooCommerce and nothing else, and it records the order value rather than which products sold.
- You sell in more than one currency. This deliberately counts an order in a foreign currency without a value attached, rather than adding unlike numbers together. That is the honest behaviour and it is also less useful than a tool that handles it properly.
- You use a form plugin outside the common four. This covers Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, WPForms and Ninja Forms. Independent Analytics supports considerably more.
- You want visitor journeys across days. Its identity model can do that. This one cannot, by design.
- Country reporting matters and you do not want to pay. It is free there and paid here.
- You want click tracking on arbitrary links and elements, rather than only on outbound links and file downloads.
Where this is the better choice
- You want the privacy limitation to be structural. No IP is stored, and the key that could link yesterday to today is destroyed daily. That is checkable in the source rather than being a policy.
- You want real-time in the free edition, which is also the fastest way to confirm the plugin is working at all.
- You want to know when your audience visits, by day and hour.
- You want crawlers separated out, including AI crawlers, on their own screen and never folded into your human numbers.
- You want a one-off licence rather than an annual one.
The honest summary
These two plugins are trying to do a similar job with a different idea about how much a piece of analytics software should be able to remember. Independent Analytics remembers more, and can therefore tell you more. This one deliberately forgets, and is upfront that a daily estimate is what you get in exchange.
Pick the trade you actually want.