Pirsch Analytics vs Simple Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Both sides assessedPirsch Analytics compared with Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics has a free forever plan with unlimited pageviews and paid pricing from €20 a month at 100,000 pageviews, but charges €20 per extra seat and offers no funnels or white labelling. Pirsch has no free tier but includes teams, funnels, unlimited sites, and white labelling at $12. Solo founders who want to start at zero pick Simple Analytics; multi-site operators and agencies pick Pirsch.
Simple Analytics compared with Pirsch Analytics
Pirsch is the German equivalent and starts cheaper at $6 a month, adding funnels, A/B testing, white labelling, and unlimited websites on its $12 Plus plan, which makes it the better agency tool. Simple Analytics has no free-tier equivalent in Pirsch (only a 30-day trial) and a free plan that Pirsch does not offer. Agencies who want white labelling pick Pirsch; solo founders who want to start at zero pick Simple Analytics.
Choose Pirsch Analytics if
German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client.
Choose Simple Analytics if
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Pirsch Analytics | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews) (free plan available) | $0 (free forever), then €20 per month |
| Pricing model | Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial. | Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier. |
| Free plan | None; the trial is the evaluation path and there is no free hosted tier. | Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. |
| Free trial | 30 days, no credit card required | 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required |
| Best for | German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client. | European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding. |
| Setup time | Minutes for the script or an SDK integration; funnels, goals, and A/B tests take an hour of deliberate configuration, and serving the script from a custom domain adds a short DNS task. | Under ten minutes: paste one script, install the WordPress plugin, or deploy through Google Tag Manager, and data appears immediately. Proxying through your own domain for blocker resilience takes an extra half hour of DNS and routing work. |
| Learning curve | Low for the dashboard, moderate for the API and server-side tracking, which is the piece that rewards a developer's involvement rather than a marketer's. | Effectively none for the dashboard, which is the entire design goal. Events, the export API, and the BI connectors are the only pieces that need documentation time. |
| Platforms | Web app (German-hosted cloud), JavaScript tracking script, Server-side SDKs, On-premise installation (Enterprise only) | Web app (EU-hosted cloud), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio connector, Power BI connector |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy and TTDSG, CCPA, Data processing agreement available as standard | GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and PECR, CCPA, CNIL and DSGVO alignment, SOC 2 in progress |
| Founded | 2019 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Rheda-Wiedenbruck, Germany | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; privately held as Emvi Software GmbH with no outside investors | Bootstrapped; 100 percent owned by its founders with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Pirsch Analytics
Strengths
- Funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling are all included at $12 a month, which competitors reserve for tiers costing several times that.
- Unlimited websites on the Plus plan makes agency economics work without a per-client subscription.
- German company, German hosting, and a standard data processing agreement give the strongest jurisdictional answer available to a German or Austrian privacy review.
- A genuine developer surface: documented REST API, official SDKs, and server-side event submission, all descended from the original open-source Go library.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, only a 30-day trial, which puts it behind Simple Analytics, Umami Cloud, and GA4 for anyone starting from zero.
- Pageview-based pricing means the $6 and $12 headline figures apply at 10,000 monthly pageviews and rise from there; high-traffic sites need to model the slider.
- Self-hosting is gated to a quote-only Enterprise tier rather than being an open-source option, unlike Umami, Plausible, or Matomo.
- No user-level analytics, replay, retention cohorts, or product analytics by design, which is the permanent cost of the cookie-free architecture.
Simple Analytics
Strengths
- A free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use and five websites, which no other serious privacy-first tool matches on volume.
- Paid pricing starts at €20 a month for 100,000 pageviews and 10 websites, with no overage surprises inside a band.
- The strongest privacy architecture claims in the group: no cookies, no browser storage, no IP storage, no visitor IDs, EU hosting under a Dutch entity.
- The traffic recovery positioning is commercially honest, acknowledging that most businesses will keep GA4 and selling a complement rather than pretending a replacement is realistic.
Limitations
- Per-seat pricing at €20 per additional user is expensive relative to competitors that bundle three to ten team members into the base price.
- The free plan's 30-day history window means trend analysis and year-over-year comparison are impossible without paying, unlike free tiers that limit volume instead.
- SOC 2 is described as in progress rather than complete, which will stall some procurement reviews that a competitor with a finished report would pass.
- SSO, role-based access, and raw data access sit behind a demo-gated Enterprise tier, so the self-serve product has a hard ceiling for larger teams.
Pricing compared
Pirsch Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial.
- StandardFrom $6
- PlusFrom $12
- EnterpriseCustom
The $12 Plus plan is the best price-to-capability ratio in privacy-first web analytics for anyone managing more than one site. Unlimited websites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling at that price undercuts Plausible Business and Fathom on the agency use case by a wide margin, and the REST API and SDKs give developers something the others do not. The costs are the absence of a free tier, which makes it a poor fit for hobby projects, and the pageview slider, which means a high-traffic publisher should check the real number before quoting the headline. Judged as an agency or developer tool, it is underpriced; judged as a first analytics install for a site with no revenue, it is the wrong shape.
Simple Analytics
Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
- Free€0
- Simple€20
- EnterpriseCustom
The free plan is the most useful free offer in privacy-first analytics because it does not meter your traffic, and for a small site the 30-day history limit is genuinely liveable for months. The €20 paid plan (100,000 pageviews, 10 websites, 3 years of history) is priced close to Plausible and Fathom at the same volume. The value breaks down on teams: at €20 per extra seat, a marketing department of five costs €100 a month for a tool whose competitors bundle ten users, so this is best value as a one-person or two-person purchase and worst value as a departmental one.
Editorial verdict on each
Pirsch Analytics
Pirsch is the best-value tool in privacy-first web analytics for anyone who runs more than one website or writes code. Twelve dollars a month buys unlimited sites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling, which is a combination the better-known names in this category charge several times more for or do not offer at all, and the REST API and SDKs make server-side tracking a real option rather than a footnote. The German company and German hosting is the cleanest jurisdictional answer on the market for a European privacy review. Two honest caveats: there is no free tier, so a pre-revenue project is better served elsewhere, and self-hosting is an Enterprise contract rather than an open-source right. If you are an agency or a developer, this is the first thing to try in the category.
Read the full Pirsch Analytics profileSimple Analytics
Simple Analytics is the most sensible starting point in privacy-first analytics for a one-person or two-person business, because the free plan gives you unlimited traffic on five sites and only asks for money when you want history back. The €20 paid plan buys three years of history on 10 websites, the AI assistant is a better interface than any report builder for non-analysts, and the Dutch EU-only architecture is the cleanest answer available to a European privacy review. Two things to check before buying: seats cost €20 each, which makes it a poor fit for a marketing department of five, and SOC 2 is still in progress. The traffic recovery pitch is the most honest thing any vendor in this category says out loud, which is that you are probably not deleting GA4, so buy the tool that gives you the numbers you can actually trust while Google keeps feeding your ads.
Read the full Simple Analytics profilePirsch Analytics profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Simple Analytics last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Pirsch Analytics and Simple Analytics?
Simple Analytics has a free forever plan with unlimited pageviews and paid pricing from €20 a month at 100,000 pageviews, but charges €20 per extra seat and offers no funnels or white labelling. Pirsch has no free tier but includes teams, funnels, unlimited sites, and white labelling at $12. Solo founders who want to start at zero pick Simple Analytics; multi-site operators and agencies pick Pirsch.
Is Pirsch Analytics or Simple Analytics cheaper?
Pirsch Analytics starts at $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews) (free plan available). Simple Analytics starts at $0 (free forever), then €20 per month. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Pirsch Analytics pricing model: Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial. Simple Analytics pricing model: Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
Does Pirsch Analytics or Simple Analytics have a free plan?
Pirsch Analytics has a free plan. None; the trial is the evaluation path and there is no free hosted tier. Trial terms: 30 days, no credit card required. Simple Analytics has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. Trial terms: 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required.
Who should choose Pirsch Analytics?
German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client.
Who should choose Simple Analytics?
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
What are the best alternatives to Pirsch Analytics and Simple Analytics?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), Umami (Best Value), HockeyStack (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
