Why this matters

In digital marketing, tracking user behavior and analytics is essential. Traditionally, cookies have been at the forefront of these efforts, but recent shifts in privacy regulations and user preferences are driving the industry towards cookieless tracking technologies. As major browsers like Chrome are likely to phase out third-party cookies in the near future, it is unavoidable for marketing professionals to explore alternatives. This guide aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of cookieless tracking, its importance, how it compares to cookie-based tracking, and the best options available today on the market.

From Cookie-based to Cookieless Tracking

You most definitely already know what cookies are. They’re small text files stored on a user’s browser to track their activity and preferences. They have been an essential tool for marketers for personalizing content, targeting advertisements, and analyzing user behavior. However, with growing concerns about privacy and data protection, the use of cookies has come under scrutiny.

How Cookieless Tracking Works

Unlike cookies, cookieless tracking does not rely on storing data on the user’s browser. One example is digital fingerprinting, where a unique identifier is created based on various attributes such as the user’s IP address, browser type, and device. This identifier can be used to track the user’s activity across different sessions and websites.

The Limitations and Challenges with Cookie-based Tracking

While cookies have been effective in tracking user behavior, they are not without their limitations. Cookies are browser-specific, meaning they do not work across different browsers, and they may present challenges in multi-device environments. They also rely on user consent, which can be a barrier to data collection. There has also been a wave of new privacy-focused browsers like Brave that created additional challenges, and on top of that cookies can also be deleted by users, making long-term tracking difficult.

The Rise of Cookieless Tracking

Cookieless tracking emerged as an alternative to cookies, allowing marketers to track user behavior without storing data on the user’s browser. Instead, cookieless tracking relies on techniques like digital fingerprinting, server-side tracking, and first-party data collection. This shift is largely driven by changes in privacy regulations and the phasing out of third-party cookies by major browsers. But while those are the factors driving the change, it’s worth highlighting that in this transition marketers may not miss cookie-based solutions after all. Let’s find out why.

Types of Solutions for Web Analytics

There are different solutions that rely on cookieless techonology to provide insights on user journeys on websites and app, but there not all built with for the same use case. In this guide we are focusing only on digital analytics, basically solutions that can be used in almost all cases as alternatives to Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. So the green quadrant is what this page is about!

It’s important thought to understand how other categories work, as they might be relevant for specific industries or use cases.

Attribution Software

Attribution software is primarily used by businesses, especially in the B2B SaaS sector, to connect revenue to marketing efforts. It helps in identifying which marketing channels and campaigns are most effective in driving sales and conversions.

How does it work?

By tracking user interactions across various touchpoints, attribution software assigns credit to different marketing channels based on their contribution to the final conversion. This data-driven approach enables businesses to optimize their marketing strategies and allocate resources more efficiently.

Digital Analytics

Digital analytics involves the granular tracking of user journeys across websites and applications. It provides insights into how users interact with online content, which pages they visit, and what actions they take.

How does it work?

Digital analytics tools collect data on user behavior, such as page views, clicks, and time spent on the site. This data is then analyzed to identify patterns and trends, which can be used to improve website design, content, and overall user experience.

Product Analytics

Product analytics is focused on providing an overview of product usage metrics. It is particularly useful for product and UX/UI teams looking to understand how users are interacting with their product.

How does it work?

By tracking events such as feature usage, user engagement, and retention, product analytics tools help teams to understand what aspects of the product are resonating with users. This information can be used to make data-driven decisions on product development and design.

Frontend Monitoring

Frontend monitoring involves tracking frontend metrics and conducting health checks for websites. It is essential for developers and website managers who need to ensure that the website is performing optimally.

How does it work?

Frontend monitoring tools track various metrics such as page load times, error rates, and responsiveness. By monitoring these metrics in real-time, developers can quickly identify and resolve issues, ensuring a smooth and efficient user experience.

Cookieless Solutions Market Landscape

As a new, fast-growing industry, there isn’t today a single dominant player, but rather multiple solutions that meet different needs. The chart below might help you understand the state of cookieless analytics solutions today.

About the chart: the industry mapping is based on research from January 2024. The “fast-movers” vs “market leaders” factor is based on elements like market share, user reviews and speed of growth based on BuiltWith data. The “easy to use” vs “advanced” factor is based on features and product scope. The chart is meant to help users in their research of the right tool and might be subject to errors.

Top 11 Cookieless Solutions for Marketers

As the industry shifts toward cookieless tracking, various solutions have emerged. Here are some of the best solutions out there.

1. Twipla (formerly Visitor Analytics)

Twipla is a website intelligence platform that employs cookieless tracking through digital fingerprinting. It offers data such as traffic structure, KPIs, page performance, visitor insights, geolocation, operating systems, devices, competition analysis, and campaign performance. Key features include heatmaps, conversion funnels, custom event tracking, and session recording. Privacy is a core aspect of Twipla, ensuring data is handled securely and in compliance with legal regulations.

Pricing: It offers a low-volume free plan (mostly for testing) and five pricing plans ranging from $10.39/mo (for 10k visits/month) to $123.20/mo (for 200k visits/month). Higher traffic thresholds require custom pricing.

2. Simple Analytics

Simple Analytics is an EU-based and hosted web analytics tool that prioritizes privacy and simplicity. It does not use cookies, making it compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR. Simple Analytics provides website owners with essential web traffic data without compromising the privacy of visitors. It is particularly known for its ease of use, fast loading times, and clear visuals. The service allows users to track page views and events without tracing individuals. Additionally, Simple Analytics offers automated reports and supports integration with various tools and platforms.

Pricing: Simple Analytics offers three pricing tiers:

• Starter Plan: Costs $10 per month when billed yearly. It includes 100,000 data points per month, 1 user, and 10 websites.
• Business Plan: Costs $49 per month or $588 yearly. It includes 1,000,000 data points per month, 10 users, and 100 websites.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing depending on usage. It includes everything from the Business plan, plus priority email support.

Free Trial: Simple Analytics offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

EU-Based: Simple Analytics is based in Amsterdam and hosts all data in the EU, making it compliant with EU privacy regulations.

3. Plausible

Plausible is a privacy-focused web analytics service. It is known for providing website owners with essential web traffic data without compromising the privacy of visitors. Plausible is lightweight and does not use cookies, making it compliant with privacy regulations like GDPR. It deletes all anonymized IP data after 24 hours, making it one of the most privacy-focused solutions out there. Also, their UI is amazing.

Pricing: starting from $9 / month. For up to 500,000 monthly page views the price is $49 / month.

Free trial: 30-day.

Other notes: data hosted in the E.U. 🇪🇺

4. Matomo

Matomo is a free and open-source web analytics tool that provides detailed information on website traffic. It offers insights into individual visitors and includes features like conversion funnels, session recordings, heatmaps, and A/B testing. Unlike most solutions listed here, it can be deployed both on-premise and on the cloud. Matomo ensures 100% data ownership and doesn’t use cookie consent banners.

Pricing: The on-premise version is free with a list of add-ons ranging from $29 to $500 a year each, these include heatmaps, A/B testing, forms and more. The cloud version starts at $19/mo and for 600,000 monthly sessions runs at $109/mo.

Free trial: 21-day, no credit card required.

5. Fathom

Fathom is a website analytics tool that provides insights through its fast dashboard. It offers information on the website’s most popular pages, sources of visitors, promotions, and top-performing products in real-time. Additionally, Fathom offers UTM campaign and event tracking features for monitoring marketing efforts.

Pricing: starting from $14 / month. For up to 500,000 monthly page views the price is $44 / month.

Free trial: 30-day, no credit card required.

6. Pirsch

Pirsch is a simple, cookie-free, and open-source web analytics solution that easily integrates into your website or backend. It is privacy-friendly and lightweight. Pirsch provides real-time insights into website statistics and allows users to see where visitors are coming from. It also enables tracking of conversion goals and events, such as button clicks and product sales​.

Pirsch is particularly notable for its strong commitment to privacy. It is GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and Schrems II compliant, ensuring that user data is handled with the utmost respect for privacy. Moreover, Pirsch is built and hosted in Germany, operating under strict European privacy laws. This means that any data collected belongs solely to the user and will never be shared or sold​.

Pricing: starting from $6 / month. For up to 500,000 monthly page views the price is $36 / month. Pirsch offers a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required for setting up your first website

Free trial: 30-day.

7. Piwik Pro

Piwik Pro is a Poland-based company that recently merged with Cookie Information, one of the leading consent management platforms. Needless to say, combining analytics with consent management makes a lot of sense, so it will be interesting to see how these two software will offer a comprehensive solution for all of your tracking and privacy needs.

Unlike other software listed here, Piwik Pro offers Tag Management, consent management and tons of other advanced features.

Pricing:

• Core Plan: free for up to 500,000 monthly actions
• Enterprise Plan: custom pricing

Free Trial: 14 days

EU-Based: yes

8. SealMetrics

SealMetrics is an EU-based web analytics tool that focuses on privacy and compliance. It is a cookieless analytics solution that tracks web traffic and sales legally and securely without using cookies nor fingerprinting. SealMetrics is designed to ensure 100% traffic and sales measurement without compromising user privacy, making it a reliable alternative to traditional analytics tools. It does not track individual visitors in any way, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR. The company and servers are located in the EU, and the traffic is 100% anonymous.

Pricing: Starting from $9/month and running at $49/month for 500,000 monthly page views.

Free Trial: 30-day.

9. Data Centurion

DataCenturion is a privacy-focused web analytics tool that allows users to track visitors in real-time. It is known for its simplicity, lightweight tracking code (less than 1kb in size), and compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. DataCenturion does not engage in IP tracking, fingerprinting, or of course the use of cookies. It provides detailed reports of website traffic, comprehensive overviews of website statistics, page performance analysis, and traffic channel acquisition insights. Additionally, DataCenturion supports integration with various platforms and allows users to export website statistics in CSV format.

Pricing: free plan available (below 1k page views/month) and only $15.99/month for 500,000 monthly sessions.

10. Swetrix

Swetrix is an ultimate open-source analytics tool that is designed to satisfy all your web analytics needs. It provides powerful and easy analytics to display all the metrics you need in a cookieless manner. Swetrix is GDPR-compliant with data and processing based in the EU zone. It also complies with HIPAA, PCI DSS, and CCPA. Swetrix offers features such as measuring website traffic with high accuracy, geo-reports, UTM & referrers tracking, custom events, user flow analysis, and performance monitoring. Additionally, Swetrix has a marketplace for browser extensions, notifications, and other functionalities to expand your possibilities. Unlike most other solutions, it offers a developer API.

Pricing Plans:

• Hobby Plan: Free. Includes up to 10,000 visits per month, add up to 20 websites, 10 alerting rules, user flow analysis, unlimited data exports, 100% data ownership, performance monitoring, shared & public dashboards, and email reports.
• Freelancer Plan: Includes everything in the Hobby plan plus 100,000 visits per month, and 20 alerting rules.
• Startup Plan: Includes everything in the Freelancer plan plus 1,000,000 visits per month, and 50 alerting rules.
• Enterprise Plan: Includes everything in the Startup plan plus 5,000,000 visits per month, add up to 50 websites, and 100 alerting rules.

EU-Based: Swetrix is based in the EU and hosts its data there, ensuring high levels of compliance with GDPR.

11. Cloudflare

While Cloudflare if mostly known for its CDN and cloud security services, it also offers a Web Analytics products that if fully cookieless. It is included in the company’s enterprise plan, coming at no extra charge. The fact that the product is not available as a standalone makes it only relevant to current Cloudflare users, likely making it an interesting option for larger companies.

Pricing: included in enterprise plans.

Our favorite solutions?

You might be wondering what’s our top 3. Given that different solutions might work best for different models, these are our picks:

• Twipla – best all-in-one analytics and user engagement solution
• Simple Analytics – easiest to use software
• Plausible – best UI and complete analytics feature-set

About free plans and scaling pricing

Most of the tools listed here offer extremely low thresholds on their free plans, often capped at 500 or 1,000 monthly page views. This means that these plans are only suitable for small personal blogs, or for testing purposes.

It’s also worth noticing that pricing is based on monthly page views, not monthly visitors. If you have 100,000 users a month on your website, with an average of 3 page views per user per session, you’re not looking at a 100k/month plan, but a 300k/month plan!

Lastly it’s important to forecast how your costs are going to change as you scale. For example, with Data Centurion, 1 million monthly page views cost $17.99 while 10 million page views would only be $29.99/month, so scaling is not a concern when it comes to pricing. In comparison, with SealMetrics, moving from 1 million to 10 million monthly page views means moving from $69 to $319/mo, more than 4 times as much. So this is an important aspect to consider.

Pricing for different solutions compared by monthly page views

	10k	50k	100k	1M	10M
Simple Analytics	$21	$21	$21	$65	custom
Matomo	$21	$21	$39	$175	$1,630
Fathom	$14	$14	$14	$54	$124
Seal Metrics	$10	$10	$21	$76	$350
Twipla	$10	$32	$63	custom	custom
Plausible	$9	$19	$19	$69	$169
Pirsch	$6	$12	$12	$54	$159
Data Centurion	$6	$10	$13	$18	$30
Swetrix	$5	$16	$16	$59	custom

There are also companies that offer higher tiers or specific add-ons, so keep in mind that the price we included here is the starting one since that tends to includes all core analytics features.

Comparing the Accuracy of Cookieless vs Cookie-based Tracking

Cookie-based tracking has long been a staple in the marketing industry. However, as we move towards a cookieless future, it is crucial to understand how the accuracy of these two tracking methods compares.

Cookie-based Tracking

Cookie-based tracking, though effective in personalizing and targeting content, relies on storing data on the user’s browser. This means that if a user clears their cookies or uses different browsers, tracking can become less accurate. Moreover, cookies require user consent, and an increasing number of users are declining cookie tracking, which further impacts accuracy, especially if a lot of your traffic comes from the European Union or other regions with strict data and privacy laws.

Cookieless Tracking

Cookieless tracking, on the other hand, uses methods like digital fingerprinting, which does not rely on browser storage and hence is not affected by users clearing cookies. This can lead to more consistent and accurate tracking over time. However, cookieless tracking methods like fingerprinting can sometimes be less precise in differentiating between users, especially if they have similar attributes.

The Verdict

While cookieless tracking offers more reliable and long-term tracking, it might sometimes be less precise in differentiating between users compared to cookie-based tracking. Ultimately, the choice between these tracking methods will depend on the specific needs of your business. One thing is for sure, the shift is happening and user tracking will always exist, so some of the limitations of cookieless technology will likely be overcome in the near future.

Why is This Transition Important Now?

The transition to cookieless tracking is driven by several factors:

1. Privacy Regulations: Laws like GDPR and CCPA are pushing for more transparent and consent-based tracking, which makes cookie-based tracking more challenging.
2. User Preferences: Users are becoming more concerned about their online privacy and are more likely to decline cookie tracking.
3. Browser Changes: Major browsers like Chrome are phasing out third-party cookies, pushing marketers to adapt to cookieless solutions.

This transition is important now because it’s not just a trend, but a fundamental shift in how user data is collected and handled. Adapting early can give marketers a competitive advantage.

How to Choose the Right Solution?

When choosing a cookieless tracking solution, consider the following factors:

1. Features: Ensure the solution provides the features you need, such as heatmaps, conversion funnels, and campaign tracking.
2. Data Privacy Compliance: Choose a solution that complies with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy laws.
3. Pricing: Evaluate the pricing plans and ensure it fits within your budget, especially as you scale.
4. Scalability: Ensure the solution can scale as your business grows.
5. Integrations: Check how you would integrate other tools into your tracking setup.
6. Support and Community: Check if the solution has a support team and a community for help and advice.

Privacy and Compliance

Using cookieless technology does not mean that your tracking set up is automatically compliant. You still need to make sure that the data is hosted and handled according to the privacy laws where you operate, which often means privacy laws anywhere in the world.

1. GDPR: Under the General Data Protection Regulation, users in the EU must provide consent for data collection. While you may not need a cookie banner, you should still do some research to make sure your tracking solution complies with GDPR requirements.
2. CCPA: The California Consumer Privacy Act grants California residents the right to know what personal data is being collected. Ensure your solution is transparent in data collection and complies with CCPA.
3. Privacy considerations: Even in instances where it is not legally required, respecting user privacy and being transparent in how data is being used may be something your organization values and has interest in advertising to their user base. In those cases, a deep understanding of how you handle the data you collect is very important.

Conclusion

The move towards cookieless tracking is a significant shift in the digital marketing industry. Understandingthe various solutions available, their features, and pricing, as well as how to choose the right one, is critical for marketing professionals navigating this new landscape. Additionally, respecting legal and ethical considerations is not only the right thing to do but also ensures your practices are sustainable in the long term. Staying up-to-date with recent developments and trends will ensure that you are always ahead in the marketing game.