A Google Analytics alternative for WordPress

Why people leave GA4

• It is built for a job most sites do not have. GA4 is an analytics product for advertisers, and the interface reflects that. Answering "which posts did well last month" should not require learning an exploration builder.
• It is another login. The numbers live somewhere other than the site they describe, so checking them is a deliberate trip rather than something you notice in passing.
• The data is not yours. It is processed and retained on someone else's terms, by a company whose business is advertising.
• It needs consent, so it undercounts. Once a chunk of your visitors decline the banner, you are making decisions on a self-selected sample and treating it as the whole.

What you get instead

Honest Analytics puts the reports in the WordPress admin, next to the posts they are about. There is no separate account, no property to configure, and no tag manager.

It is also cookieless by default and stores no IP addresses, which means it is designed not to require an analytics consent banner in its default configuration. You are counting everybody rather than the subset who clicked accept.

The free edition covers pageviews and daily unique visitors, sessions and bounce rate, real-time, your top pages, sources and devices. The features page shows every screen.

What GA4 does that this does not

Worth being straight about, because for some sites these are the deciding factors.

• Cross-day individual journeys. The anonymous identifier is destroyed every 24 hours, so unique visitors are daily estimates and there is no lifetime user figure. That is the trade being made, not an oversight.
• Advertising integration. No Google Ads linking, no remarketing audiences, no conversion export to an ad platform. If you are running paid acquisition that depends on that loop, GA4 is doing a job this does not attempt.
• Demographics and interests. Inferred audience data comes from exactly the cross-site profiling this plugin exists to avoid.
• Free at any scale. GA4 costs nothing in money. This costs a little disk and, for the Pro reports, a one-off licence.

If you need the advertising loop, keep GA4 for that and be deliberate about it. If you have been keeping GA4 open out of habit and only ever look at the top-pages report, the swap is straightforward.

Bringing your history across

You do not have to start from zero, and this is in the free edition rather than held back for a paid tier. Honest Analytics imports from Google Analytics 4, and also from WP Statistics and Independent Analytics if you are coming from one of those.

Whole days are replaced rather than appended, so running an import twice is safe. The import screen is also honest about why the totals will not match GA4 exactly: two tools that count differently will disagree, and a tool that claimed otherwise would be hiding something. The import guide explains where the differences come from.

Running both for a while

A reasonable way to switch is not to switch at once. Install the free edition alongside GA4, leave them both running for a month, and compare. You will see the gap that consent and ad blockers were opening in your GA4 numbers, and you will find out whether the reports here answer what you actually ask.

Nothing about the free edition expires or nags you into upgrading, so there is no clock on making up your mind.

Which edition you need

Most sites replacing GA4 for ordinary reporting need nothing beyond the free edition. Pro is for the reports that need more context: campaigns, locations, events, goals, funnels and crawler reporting. Pricing covers both, and Pro is a one-off licence rather than a subscription.