Honest Analytics vs Koko Analytics
Pick Koko Analytics if: you want the smallest possible thing that answers how many people read a post, and you would rather have four numbers you trust than twenty you have to interpret.
Koko Analytics is the closest thing to a shared philosophy with this plugin. It is free and open source, it stores everything in your own WordPress database, it can run without cookies, it is deliberately tiny, and it has been doing that for years across sixty thousand sites. Its own description says there are “no complicated reports to dig through”, which could be a line from this website.
If you are choosing between the two, you are not choosing between good and bad. You are choosing how much you want.
Koko’s position is minimalism, and it means it
Koko gives you pageviews, visitors, top pages and referrers. That is close to the whole product, and the restraint is the point rather than a roadmap gap. It adds under a kilobyte to your pages. Its paid tier adds countries, technology, email reports, UTM campaigns, custom events and alerts.
Honest Analytics is a larger free edition and a larger paid one. Free gives you the same core plus sessions and bounce rate, real-time, content performance grouped by post type, taxonomy and author, device and browser breakdowns, an hour-by-day heatmap, per-page detail, page comparison, a privacy screen and imports. Pro adds campaigns, locations, events, goals, funnels and crawler reporting.
More is not automatically better. A plugin with four screens is faster to understand than one with sixteen, and if four screens answer your questions the extra twelve are cost rather than value.
Side by side
| Honest Analytics | Koko Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Data in your WordPress database | Yes | Yes |
| Cookieless | Always, with no setting to change | Optional |
| Page weight | A small first-party script | Under 1 KB |
| Real-time view | Free | Not offered |
| Hour-by-day heatmap | Free | Not offered |
| Import from other tools | Free: GA4, WP Statistics, Independent Analytics | Not offered |
| Devices and browsers | Free | Paid |
| Countries | Paid | Paid |
| Campaigns and events | Paid | Paid |
| Email reports | Paid | Paid |
| Traffic spike alerts | Not offered | Paid |
| Goals and funnels | Paid | Not offered |
| Crawler reporting | Paid | Not offered |
Where the products genuinely differ
Cookies. Koko can run without them and documents how. Honest Analytics has no cookie mode to turn on or off in the default configuration: the anonymous identifier comes from a salt that is overwritten every 24 hours, and there is no setting that makes it persistent.
Real-time. Free here, and it is the thing that tells you the plugin is working ten minutes after you install it. Koko does not present a live view in the same way.
When people visit. The hour-by-day heatmap is a free-edition screen here and has no equivalent in Koko.
Bringing history with you. Imports from Google Analytics 4, WP Statistics and Independent Analytics are in the free edition. If you are moving from an existing tool with years of data, that is the difference between switching and starting again.
Crawlers. Reported on their own screen in Pro, named individually, and never folded into your human numbers. Increasingly this includes AI crawlers, which most tools either ignore or silently count as people.
Where Koko is the better choice
- You want the smallest thing that works. Genuinely: if pageviews, visitors, top pages and referrers is your list, Koko is a better fit and you should install it.
- Performance is the overriding concern. Under a kilobyte on the page is hard to beat.
- You do not want to think about editions. Koko’s free version covers its core completely.
- It is already installed and answering your questions. Switching analytics costs you a discontinuity in the data. Do not pay that for features you will not open.
Where this is the better choice
- You want to know when your audience turns up, not just how many.
- You are switching from something else and want the history to come with you.
- You want to measure outcomes - goals, funnels, events - rather than only traffic.
- You want to know how much of your traffic is crawlers, which on a lot of sites is a larger and more surprising number than people expect.
The honest summary
Koko Analytics is a good plugin built by people who thought hard about restraint, and there is a version of this comparison where the right advice is “use Koko”. If its four numbers are your four numbers, that is the advice. This is for the case where you have started asking a fifth question.