GitHubGet Started Free
BlogUse case

The best analytics for bloggers in 2026

Abbas Aga
Abbas Aga · 1 min read

TL;DR:
The best analytics for bloggers in 2026 is Open Analytics for a readable dashboard plus depth when you want it, or Plausible for the absolute simplest option. Umami is free to self-host and Simple Analytics is the most privacy-maximal. All are cookieless and lightweight, so none needs a consent banner or slows your pages.

A blog needs to know what people read, how they found it, and whether they stayed, nothing heavier. The privacy-first tools are ideal here: light scripts, no cookie banner interrupting a reader, and dashboards you can actually read. The only real choice is how much depth you want beyond top pages and sources.

What a blog needs

  • Top pages and sources: what's read, and where readers come from.
  • A light script: no slow pages, no cookie banner.
  • Low or no price: a blog rarely justifies an enterprise tool.
  • Readable: numbers at a glance, not a course.

The tools, ranked for this

  1. 01

    Open Analytics

    That's us

    A readable, cookieless dashboard with top pages and sources, plus revenue and journeys the day your blog becomes a business.

    Price: From $9/mo for 50,000 events (a pageview or anything you tag), 3-day free trial.

    Strengths

    • Revenue attributed back to the visit and source that earned it
    • Built-in MCP server: ask your analytics in plain English
    • Realtime journeys, funnels and Core Web Vitals in one script
    • Open source (AGPL) and self-hostable

    Trade-offs

    • Newer than Plausible or Fathom
    • Meters events, so tagged conversions count
    • No free plan, only the trial
  2. 02

    Plausible

    The simplest possible dashboard, made for exactly this.

    Price: From $9/mo for 10,000 pageviews.

    Strengths

    • One clean page
    • Tiny script
    • Open source

    Trade-offs

    • Pageview-metered
    • No journey
    • No revenue
  3. 03

    Umami

    Free to self-host if you already run a server for your blog.

    Price: Free self-hosted; Cloud free for 100,000 events on one site.

    Strengths

    • Free tier covers most blogs
    • Light
    • Open source

    Trade-offs

    • You maintain it
    • Fewer importers
    • Basic depth
  4. 04

    Simple Analytics

    The most privacy-maximal, with a genuinely free tier.

    Price: From $20/mo; free 30-day-history plan.

    Strengths

    • No visitor IDs at all
    • Free tier
    • Embeddable charts

    Trade-offs

    • Per-user pricing on paid
    • Shallow
    • Pageview-metered

Prices were checked against each product's own pricing page on 2026-08-07 and change often. Read the current plan, and the meter it counts, before you commit.

Open Analytics is the events-metered, revenue-aware option with an AI-queryable dataset. Try it free for three days.

Start free trial

Frequently asked questions

What is the best analytics for a blog?
Plausible for the simplest possible dashboard, or Open Analytics if you want that simplicity now and depth (revenue, journeys) later as the blog grows. Umami is free to self-host and Simple Analytics has a free tier. All are cookieless and light, so none needs a consent banner.
Is there free analytics for bloggers?
Yes. Umami is free to self-host and its cloud has a free tier for 100,000 events on one site, and Simple Analytics offers a free plan with 30 days of history. These comfortably cover most blogs; paid tools start at $9 a month if you want more depth or history.
Will analytics slow down my blog?
Not the privacy-first ones. Their scripts are tiny (around 2 KB) load asynchronously, and set no cookies, so there is no banner and no meaningful performance cost. That is a large part of why bloggers moved off Google Analytics, whose tag is heavier and cookie-based.

Keep reading