CapraLens vs GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami & Matomo
The honest version: every tool below is a reasonable choice for someone. Here is where they actually differ — consent banners, who holds the data, and what performance signals you get out of the box.
| CapraLens | GA4 | Plausible | Fathom | Umami | Matomo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consent banner needed | No — no cookies, no personal data stored | Typically yes under GDPR | No | No | No | Can run cookieless (configuration) |
| Visitor identity | Daily-rotating salted hash — no cross-day tracking | Persistent identifiers | Daily-rotating hash | Rotating hash | Rotating salted hash | Configurable |
| Core Web Vitals (LCP · CLS · INP) | Built in | Not in standard reports | — | — | — | — |
| Scroll depth & session duration | Built in | Via configuration | Partial | Partial | Via custom events | Yes |
| Public share dashboards | Yes — token links | — | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Data export | CSV (paid tiers) + API | BigQuery export | CSV | CSV | API (self-host: full DB) | Full (self-host) |
| Price per month | €0 · €9 Pro · €29 Business | Free | from ~€9 | from ~$15 | free self-host / Cloud paid | from ~€22 cloud / free self-host |
Competitor details are drawn from each vendor's public materials and may lag their latest changes — verify with the vendor before deciding. The CapraLens column is read from our own code, not our marketing.
Switching from GA4?
The two most common reasons people leave GA4: the consent machinery it drags in, and reports that need a training course to answer “how many people visited?” CapraLens gives you the numbers a site owner actually acts on — visitors, pages, referrers, vitals, scroll — on one screen, with nothing to configure and no banner to bolt on. Install is one script tag; your first events show up live.
Why there's no consent banner
CapraLens sets no cookies and stores no personal data. Visitors are counted with a salted hash that rotates every day, so there is no cross-day identity to consent to — the banner question never arises, because the data it protects is never collected. (We build software, not legal advice: assess your own setup.)
Whether that is true of your site is a different question, and it usually turns on something other than your analytics. Five questions will tell you — including when the honest answer is that you need a consent platform instead.
We run it on everything we own
CapraLens measures all eleven of our own live products — every pageview, vitals sample and scroll event on our sites flows through the same ingest our customers use. When something breaks, we feel it before you do.
What CapraLens deliberately doesn't do
No advertising attribution suite, no session recordings, no demographic profiles. If your business runs on those, GA4 or a session-replay tool is genuinely the better fit — we would rather tell you that here than after you have signed up.
Try it on your site
Free tier, one site, no card. The embed is one script tag and the first events show up live.