Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Plausible Analytics vs Google Analytics 4 vs Microsoft Clarity

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Plausible Analytics (plausible-analytics)
- URL: https://plausible.io
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: paid — Starter $9/mo for 10K pageviews, Growth about $14/mo, Business about $19/mo. 30-day trial, no free plan. Community Edition self-host is free.
- What it is: A lightweight open-source analytics script under 1KB that reports visitors, sources, pages and goals on one dashboard. It sets no cookies and stores no personal data or persistent identifiers, so EU sites need no consent banner. Community Edition is AGPLv3 and self-hostable.
- Why builders pick it: The fastest way to get a clean traffic dashboard on a blog or marketing site without adding a cookie banner or having a conversation with a lawyer.
- Trap: No permanent free cloud plan, only a 30-day trial. Community Edition ships just twice a year and omits funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API.
- Wiring: npm i next-plausible
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/plausible-analytics

## Google Analytics 4 (google-analytics-4)
- URL: https://analytics.google.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free for standard properties at essentially any volume. GA4 360 historically starts around $50,000/yr.
- What it is: Google's event-based analytics platform, free for standard properties, with audiences, attribution modelling, Search Console linking and a daily BigQuery export capped at 1M events. Standard properties allow 50 event-scoped custom dimensions and 30 key events. Cloud-only, with no self-hosted equivalent.
- Why builders pick it: It costs nothing at any traffic level and it is still what advertisers, SEO tools and clients expect to see, so it often ends up running alongside a nicer tool rather than instead of one.
- Trap: Retention maxes at 14 months (default 2) and explorations sample above 10M events per query. EU traffic needs a consent banner plus Consent Mode v2, and several EU regulators have ruled plain GA deployments unlawful without extra safeguards.
- Wiring: npm i @next/third-parties
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/google-analytics-4

## Microsoft Clarity (microsoft-clarity)
- URL: https://clarity.microsoft.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free forever with no traffic limits and no paid tier.
- What it is: Microsoft's free behavioural analytics tool offering unlimited session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, rage-click and dead-click detection, and AI summaries of sessions. There are no traffic caps and no paid upgrade path. Cloud-only, with an optional Google Analytics integration.
- Why builders pick it: Unlimited free session replay is unmatched at any price. Watching ten real people fumble your onboarding teaches you more in an hour than a month of staring at funnel charts.
- Trap: It sets the _clck and _clsk cookies, and since 31 October 2025 Clarity requires a valid consent signal for EEA, UK and Swiss visitors, so without a CMP those sessions will not record. Recordings can capture PII unless you mask fields.
- Wiring: npm i @microsoft/clarity
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/microsoft-clarity

## Quick read

- Free with no card: Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity.

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=plausible-analytics,google-analytics-4,microsoft-clarity