GA4 costs nothing and it's still, for a lot of small sites, the more expensive option — because "free" doesn't account for the cookie-consent banner you're legally required to bolt onto your site to use it in the EU and UK, plus everything that comes with building and maintaining one.
Plausible and Umami sidestep that requirement entirely, because they're cookieless by design — no persistent identifier, so no consent banner needed in most jurisdictions. For a lot of teams that switch, that's the actual reason, more than any dashboard feature: fewer moving legal parts, not a prettier chart.
| Tool | Model | Entry price | Consent banner? |
|---|---|---|---|
| GA4 | free (ad-funded) | $0 | yes, in EEA/UK |
| Plausible Cloud | usage-based | $9/mo (10k pageviews) → ~$19/mo at 100k | no (cookieless) |
| Umami Cloud | usage-based | free tier, then ~$19/mo at 100k | no (cookieless) |
| Umami self-hosted | run it yourself | ~$5/mo VPS | no (cookieless) |
That's not to say GA4 doesn't earn its keep for the right buyer. It has genuinely deeper funnels, audience building, native Google Ads integration and BigQuery export — none of which Plausible or Umami are trying to replicate. What you get from the two alternatives instead is the stuff most sites actually use: goals, basic revenue tracking, UTM breakdowns, and — for Plausible specifically — Search Console integration and a one-click GA import if you're migrating away. Umami goes further in the other direction, staying deliberately lean: core traffic metrics, MIT-licensed, nothing dressed up as an upsell because there's nothing to upsell.
Pricing across the two privacy-first tools stayed roughly stable this year. What kept moving was GA4's own complexity and consent burden, which continued to push small sites, developer blogs, and anyone who didn't want to think about cookie law toward the alternatives — not a marketing push from Plausible or Umami so much as GA4 getting harder to justify at small scale.
If you run Google Ads or need real audience segmentation, GA4 is free, powerful, and worth the consent-banner overhead — that's a real trade, not a trap. If you want a clean one-page dashboard and would rather not deal with consent requirements at all, Plausible's hosted tier is cheap enough at small scale that the decision barely costs anything either way. And if you're comfortable running a $5 VPS yourself, Umami gets you privacy-friendly analytics for close to nothing — the only real cost is the afternoon it takes to set it up.