Simple Analytics gets the hardest part right: no cookies, no personal data, no one followed around your site. You and it agree there completely. With privacy already settled between you, what is left to choose is reach: count your traffic cleanly and stop there, or also put it to work, on your SEO, your content and your growth.
| mandera | Simple Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Privacy & measurement | ||
| Cookieless, no personal data, no consent banner | ✓ no cookies, no banner | ✓ cookieless, IP dropped on every request, no consent banner¹ |
| EU data residency | ✓ Germany | ✓ Netherlands, states data never leaves the EU² |
| Analytics | ||
| Core traffic analytics (pageviews, visits, sources, countries, devices) | ✓ | ✓ clean one-page dashboard³ |
| Events, goals and funnels | Partial: events, no conversion goals or funnels | ✓ events, Goals & Funnels, Events Explorer⁴ |
| Engagement metrics (scroll %, time on page) | ✓ plus visual heatmaps | Partial: an aggregate scroll-percentage number and time on page, not a visual heatmap⁵ |
| Data access (APIs, CSV export, email reports) | ✕ in-dashboard only | ✓ Stats, Export and Admin APIs, CSV, email reports⁶ |
| Bypass ad-blockers (first-party proxy) | ✕ not offered | ✓ optional proxy or custom-domain setup¹¹ |
| Beyond traffic counting | ||
| Heatmaps (click, scroll, mouse) | ✓ built in, every page | ✕ not a documented feature⁷ |
| User Flow / path mapping | ✓ aggregated User Flow map | ✕ no path or flow analysis⁵ |
| Your SEO rankings, retrieved automatically | ✓ weekly, zero setup | ✕ no keyword or ranking feature⁷ |
| AI assistant | ✓ acts on your data | Partial: Simple Analytics AI chats over your existing data for insights and charts⁸ |
| AI growth-opportunity finding and content/strategy co-creation | ✓ | ✕ its AI interprets existing data, it does not co-write content or strategy⁸ |
| Brand Memory: learns your business | ✓ | ✕ no brand-context store documented⁸ |
| Plans & pricing | ||
| Free-forever tier | ✕ 7-day trial, 10 opportunities | ✓ unlimited pageviews under fair use, badge required⁹ |
| Free trial | ✓ 7 days, 10 opportunities | ✓ 14 days, all features, no credit card⁹ |
| Pricing model | One flat price, 1 million pageviews per month included | Paid "Self-serve" from €20/month, €60/month at 1 million pageviews, priced via a data-point slider that scales with traffic⁹ |
If you want exactly clean, private traffic counting and nothing more, Simple Analytics is an excellent choice, honestly. The rest of this page speaks to anyone who wants their numbers put to work, not just counted.
Simple Analytics earned its reputation. It is built around a single, configuration-free one-page dashboard that shows your traffic in seconds, and that deliberate minimalism is a real virtue, not a gap. For a team that wants exactly clean analytics and nothing more, it does its chosen job well: pageviews, unique visits, referrers, UTM and device and country filtering, time on page, events, Goals and Funnels, plus APIs, CSV export and email reports, and an optional proxy that keeps your data complete even where an ad-blocker would otherwise block it.³ ⁴ ⁶ ¹¹
It is also genuinely privacy-first and ethical by design. It is cookieless and needs no consent banner, it drops IP addresses on every request, it uses the browser time zone instead of IP-based geolocation, it respects Do Not Track by default, and it states it will never sell customer data.¹ ¹⁰ It is a Dutch company hosting data in the Netherlands on named EU providers, it offers a real free-forever tier with no credit card, and it includes a friendly AI to chat with your traffic data.² ⁸ ⁹ If your entire requirement is "show me my traffic, simply and privately", you can stop reading here and pick Simple Analytics. Honestly. We'd rather you picked the tool that fits than the page that shouts loudest.
Everything below is a live demo, not a screenshot. Click around.
First, the basics. Where you'd normally open Simple Analytics - traffic over time, page views, visit duration, sources, top pages - mandera gives the same answers, calm and without a banner. Consider this the starting line, not the sales pitch. Where the two part ways is everything that happens after the counting.
Simple Analytics counts your pages but, by design, never links data to a specific visitor, so it does not build path or flow analysis.⁵ mandera's User Flow takes a different route: it maps real, aggregated journeys through your site, where people enter, where they go next, where they leave, with no funnel steps to define and no individual tracked. Unexpected detours show up, along with the exact pages where journeys run out.
Every page you track already includes click, scroll and mouse-movement heatmaps - no extra tool, no second script, no separate bill. Simple Analytics reports an aggregate scroll-percentage number, which is useful but is a single figure per page, not a visual heatmap, and it documents no heatmap feature.⁵ ⁷ With mandera you see where visitors click, how far they read, and which areas hold attention.
One thing mandera leaves out on purpose: session recording. Tracking one visitor's every move is about as privacy-invasive as behaviour tools get, and it has no place in a privacy-first product, which is exactly why Simple Analytics doesn't offer it either.⁵ Aggregated heat, yes. Surveillance replays, no.
Here the comparison moves beyond what Simple Analytics does. Simple Analytics counts traffic cleanly, but it documents no keyword, ranking or SERP feature anywhere.⁷
mandera natively pulls in every keyword your site already ranks for and refreshes them each week. No research tool, no manual rank tracking, and zero setup. Your rankings sit next to the real traffic they send you, so you finally see where you stand in search without leaving your analytics.
Simple Analytics has Simple Analytics AI, a chat-with-your-data assistant: you ask questions about your analytics in plain English and get instant insights, charts and recommendations over your own traffic data.⁸ It is a genuinely useful insight layer on top of the numbers it already counts.
mandera's AI is built to act, not only to answer. Its Agentic Engine looks across your traffic, your rankings and your site, pulls out the growth opportunities sitting in them, and helps you shape each into a strategy with ready-to-use content. A Context suite (Brand Memory) learns your business so the work sounds like you. Nothing goes live on your site unless you sign off on it. That is the difference between chatting about your numbers and growing them.⁸
This is the rare comparison where privacy is not the wedge. Both tools are cookieless and collect no personal data, so neither needs a consent banner. Simple Analytics drops IP addresses on every request and hosts in the Netherlands, stating data never leaves the EU.¹ ² mandera drops the IP on arrival for every visitor and stores data in Germany, inside the EU. You have already chosen privacy right with either one.
Because privacy is settled, the honest difference is what each tool does after it counts. Simple Analytics deliberately stops at clean, ethical traffic counting. mandera adds an SEO suite, built-in heatmaps, User Flow and an AI engine that acts on your data. Same respect for your visitors, a wider job on the other side of the count.
See our full privacy & compliance page, written for your legal team: hosting, sub-processors, data location, retention and your rights, on one page.
Simple Analytics is genuinely generous at the entry. It offers a free-forever tier with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, one user and five websites, no credit card required, with a small badge in return.⁹ That is a real free tier, and we should say so plainly: mandera does not have one. mandera offers a 7-day free trial with 10 high-impact opportunities, not a free-forever plan. If a no-cost tier is your priority, Simple Analytics wins that point outright.
On paid plans the models differ in shape. Simple Analytics' "Self-serve" plan starts at €20 per month for one user and is priced through a data-point slider, so the fee scales up as your traffic grows, reaching €60 per month at one million pageviews; annual billing is advertised as "2 months free", and Enterprise is custom-priced.⁹ mandera is a subscription with one flat fee that includes 1 million pageviews per month, a ceiling most websites never get near, and within it the price does not climb as your traffic grows, so a spike in visitors is purely good news. One flat fee buys the entire system: analytics, heatmaps, SEO rankings, User Flow and the AI engine with its opportunities, strategies and content. Think of it not as a tidy analytics bill but as the stack of tools it stands in for.
Everything the analytics suite measures also feeds mandera's agentic engine, a deeply integrated, multilayered AI system that works automatically. The engine turns your data into growth opportunities and ready-to-use strategies. Hover any stage to see how it flows, or jump straight to another suite below.
Subscribe to mandera and put the whole system to work on your growth. Your free trial includes 10 high-impact opportunities to get you started.
Start free trialPartial means the capability exists with a documented limit or condition: Simple Analytics reports scroll percentage and time on page as aggregate numbers rather than visual heatmaps⁵, and its AI chats over your existing analytics data to surface insights rather than finding opportunities or co-writing content⁸.
Sources. ¹ Simple Analytics data collection and privacy (docs.simpleanalytics.com/data-collection, docs.simpleanalytics.com/privacy) · ² GDPR compliance and EU hosting (simpleanalytics.com/gdpr-compliance) · ³ Features and one-page dashboard (simpleanalytics.com/features, simpleanalytics.com) · ⁴ Events, Goals & Funnels (docs.simpleanalytics.com/events) · ⁵ Metrics: scroll percentage, time on page, no path analysis (docs.simpleanalytics.com/metrics) · ⁶ APIs, CSV export and email reports (docs.simpleanalytics.com/api, docs.simpleanalytics.com/email-reports) · ⁷ Absence of heatmaps and keyword ranking, checked across docs and homepage (docs.simpleanalytics.com) · ⁸ Simple Analytics AI (simpleanalytics.com/ai) · ⁹ Pricing: free tier, 14-day trial, Self-serve from €20/month, €60/month at 1 million pageviews on the data-point slider, Enterprise custom (simpleanalytics.com/pricing, verified 14 June 2026) · ¹⁰ Compliance: Do Not Track, never sells data (docs.simpleanalytics.com/compliance) · ¹¹ Bypass ad-blockers via proxy or custom domain (docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers, docs.simpleanalytics.com/proxy). Feature availability and limits may depend on plan.
Feature information verified on 14 June 2026, based on each provider's public documentation. Spotted something outdated? Tell us and we will fix it.
Simple Analytics is a trademark of its respective owner. mandera is not affiliated with Simple Analytics.