Review: four cookieless analytics tools compared

Software Reviews · 2025-11-30 · 10 min read

By Arjun Mehta, Engineering & product

We ran four privacy-first analytics scripts side by side on the same traffic for six weeks. The numbers disagreed more than expected.

Cookieless analytics tools all promise the same thing — useful numbers without a consent banner — and then define a session differently, which is why two dashboards on the same site rarely match.

Script weight ranged from 0.7 KB to 13 KB gzipped. On a mid-range Android over a congested network, the heaviest option added measurable delay to first interaction, which matters more than any dashboard feature.

Session definitions differed by up to 18 percent on identical traffic. None of them is wrong; they simply draw the boundary of a visit at different idle thresholds. Pick one and stop comparing absolute numbers across tools.

Funnel support was the real differentiator. Two tools treated funnels as first-class and let us define steps from existing pageviews; the others required custom events for every step, which pushed work back onto engineering.

Our recommendation for a small team: choose the lightest script that supports retroactive funnels, export raw data monthly, and accept that trends matter more than decimals.

Tags: analytics, privacy, review

Arjun Mehta — Arjun writes about web performance, developer tooling and applied AI for ESPYCRUX. He has spent the last decade building and maintaining production web apps, and most of his articles start from something that broke in one of them.