TL;DR — The reason to move is rarely the tool. Behavioural analytics on an identifiable visitor is a consent question under the DPDP Rules, 2025, and consent-gated data is incomplete data. Cookieless, aggregate measurement avoids most of the problem for a marketing site. Umami, Plausible Community Edition and Matomo are free to self-host under their licences; their hosted plans start at $0, $9 and €29 a month respectively as of 22 September 2026. Vedatricks Analytics is cookieless, hosted by us, included with the sites we build, and quoted on request for any other site.
Why are Indian businesses reviewing their analytics?
Because the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 were notified on 14 November 2025 with an eighteen-month phased compliance period, and they set obligations on notice, consent and breach reporting for anyone processing digital personal data. Behavioural analytics tied to an identifiable visitor sits inside that scope, so the tool and the consent flow now get reviewed together.
Consent-gated data is incomplete data: whoever declines is not counted. The lower-risk design is to measure in aggregate without identifiers, and to ask for consent only where identified data is needed — a CRM record, a payment, a signed-in account.
What does “cookieless” mean in an analytics tool?
It means the visitor is counted without anything persistent being set as a cookie on their device. Plausible, for example, derives a visitor identifier from a hash of a daily-rotating salt, the website domain, the IP address and the user agent, deletes the salt every 24 hours, and never stores the raw IP or user agent.
Returning visitors are therefore recognised within a day, not across weeks. Tools differ in the detail: Umami states that it uses no cookies and collects no personally identifiable information, while Matomo sets cookies by default and is switched to cookieless by adding _paq.push(['disableCookies']) before the page-view call.
Vedatricks Analytics sets no cookie, but it keeps a random visitor id in the browser’s own storage and records the IP address on the server to resolve a city, so treat it as analytics a visitor can refuse. You lose long-window retention analysis with any of these designs and gain a simpler consent position.
How do the self-hosted options compare?
All four run without a cookie, three of them by default. Umami (MIT), Plausible Community Edition (AGPL-3.0-or-later) and Matomo (GPL-3.0-or-later) are free to self-host under their licences and sell hosted plans; Vedatricks Analytics is hosted by us, included with the sites we build, and quoted on request for other sites. The differences are the stack you must operate and which reports sit behind a paid tier.
Web analytics options, as of 22 September 2026
| Tool | Runs on | Cookieless | Funnels and retention | Licence for self-hosting | Hosted plan, listed price (read 22 Sep 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vedatricks Analytics | Hosted by Vedatricks at analytics.vedatricks.com; a script tag and a website id on your site | Yes — no cookie; a random visitor id in the browser’s storage | In build: funnels, attribution, journeys and retention, custom events | Not self-hosted; runs on Vedatricks hosting | Included at no separate charge with sites Vedatricks builds; no published standalone plan, quoted on request (vedatricks.com/analytics) |
| Umami | Node.js 18.18+ with PostgreSQL 12.14+, or the Docker Compose file | Yes — “does not use cookies” | Funnel, retention, journey, goals, UTM, revenue and attribution reports on every Cloud plan; Umami names email reports and the streaming API among the features not in the self-hosted version | MIT | Umami Cloud: Hobby $0 a month (100K events, 1 website, 6-month retention); Pro $20 a month (1 million events, up to 20 websites, 2-year retention) — umami.is/pricing |
| Plausible Community Edition | Elixir and Phoenix with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, via Docker Compose; at least 2 GB RAM recommended | Yes — daily-rotating salted hash | Funnels are a Business-plan feature on Plausible Cloud and, per Plausible’s CE announcement, kept exclusive to Business subscribers | AGPL-3.0-or-later (tracker script MIT) | Plausible Cloud: Starter $9 a month for up to 10k pageviews and 1 site; Business $19 a month adds funnels; yearly billing gives two months free — plausible.io/#pricing |
| Matomo | PHP 8.1+ with MySQL 8.0+ or MariaDB 10.6+ | Configurable — cookies on by default; disableCookies switches them off | Funnels and Heatmaps & Session Recording are premium plugins, bought on the Marketplace (Funnels from US$239 a year for 1–4 users, yearly billing) or included in the paid On-Premise bundles | GPL-3.0-or-later; On-Premise Community “free forever” with “unlimited users and hits” | Matomo Cloud: from €29 a month at 50K hits a month, two months free on annual billing — matomo.org/pricing |
Prices are the vendors’ own listed figures on the date shown, in the currency they list; none includes Indian GST or the server you run the software on. Re-read each pricing page before you decide, because plans change without notice and this article is only re-checked when the date above is updated.
Free under the licence means free of licence fees. A self-hosted install still needs a server, updates and backups — Plausible CE recommends at least 2 GB of RAM for ClickHouse alone, and Matomo’s paid On-Premise bundles start at €275 a month for four users and 5 million hits. Budget the person who will run it, not only the box.
What should I measure on a small business site?
Six events cover most decisions: page views, call-to-action clicks, form starts, form submissions, WhatsApp clicks and payments. Name them consistently — form_submit with a form identifier, not five differently named events — and the reports build themselves. Naming, not tooling, is where the reports break, so write the event list before you choose the tool.
How do I attribute a lead that arrived through WhatsApp?
Capture the campaign parameters and click identifiers when the visitor lands, keep them in your site’s own storage, and attach them as hidden fields to every form and as a reference code in the WhatsApp link text. Without that, a WhatsApp conversation arrives with no origin and every ad channel claims it.
The reference code is the part most sites skip. A wa.me link can carry pre-filled text, and a short code inside it — the campaign and the page — is what lets the person answering the phone record where the lead came from. In Vedatricks Analytics, carrying UTM and ad click ids onto the lead record is the attribution capability marked in build.
Where does Vedatricks Analytics fit?
It suits the sites and applications we build, where it is installed on day one, and any existing site that can add a script tag and a website id. It sets no cookie, the script and endpoint run on analytics.vedatricks.com rather than an advertising network, and the dashboards cover traffic, sources, pages, devices and city-level geography. It is included at no separate charge with the sites and software we build; a standalone plan for sites we did not build is not published yet, and we quote it on request.
Multi-property roll-ups, custom events, funnels, attribution, journeys and retention, and a weekly written summary are in build — on the roadmap, not in an account today. What is recorded: a random visitor id, the page, the referrer, the device and browser, the IP address and the city it resolves to; no name, email or phone number. The tracker sends nothing when a visitor’s stored consent choice declines analytics.
Sources
- Umami Cloud pricing — umami.is/pricing, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Umami repository, MIT licence and requirements — github.com/umami-software/umami, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible pricing — plausible.io/#pricing, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible data policy, cookieless visitor counting — plausible.io/data-policy, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible docs, funnel analysis as a Business plan feature — plausible.io/docs/funnel-analysis, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible Community Edition announcement — plausible.io/blog/community-edition, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible analytics repository, AGPL-3.0-or-later — github.com/plausible/analytics, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Plausible Community Edition repository, requirements — github.com/plausible/community-edition, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Matomo pricing, Cloud and On-Premise — matomo.org/pricing, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Matomo Marketplace, Funnels plugin — plugins.matomo.org/Funnels, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Matomo repository, GPL v3 (or later) and requirements — github.com/matomo-org/matomo, read 22 Sep 2026.
- Matomo FAQ, tracking without cookies — matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157, read 22 Sep 2026.
- DPDP Rules, 2025 Notified — PIB explainer, 14 November 2025 — static.pib.gov.in (PDF), read 22 Sep 2026.
- Vedatricks Analytics product page — vedatricks.com/analytics, read 22 Sep 2026.