Simple Analytics lives up to its name — clean, minimal, and privacy-first. sourcebeam shares that philosophy but goes deeper with revenue attribution, visitor-level insights, and an API built for the AI era.
$5/mo
vs $9/mo minimum
<1 KB
vs ~6 KB script
Visitor-level
vs aggregate only
$5/month vs $9/month minimum. Simple Analytics starts at $9/month (Starter plan) for 100,000 datapoints. There is no free tier — just a 14-day trial. sourcebeam starts at just $5/month for 10,000 events, with no feature restrictions. For developers running personal sites, open source projects, or early-stage products, this means professional analytics at nearly half the entry cost.
Revenue attribution, not just event counts. Simple Analytics tracks pageviews and custom events, which is enough to understand traffic patterns. But if you sell something — whether it is a SaaS subscription, an ebook, or a physical product — understanding which visitors actually generate revenue changes everything. sourcebeam integrates directly with Stripe to attribute every dollar to the traffic source, landing page, and campaign that produced it. No manual event tagging, no conversion value configuration.
Individual visitor journeys. Simple Analytics is designed around aggregated metrics — it intentionally avoids tracking individual visitors to maximize privacy. sourcebeam takes a different approach: it tracks visitor journeys across sessions using privacy-respecting methods (no cookies, no personal data), so you can see the path from first visit to conversion. How many sessions did it take? Which pages did they return to? What was the trigger for their purchase? These insights are impossible with purely aggregate data.
AI-native analytics. sourcebeam's read-only API is designed specifically for LLM consumption. Connect it to Claude or ChatGPT and ask natural language questions about your data: "What percentage of my mobile visitors bounce?" "Which UTM campaign had the best conversion rate this quarter?" Simple Analytics has an API, but it was built for traditional programmatic access, not conversational AI queries.
Lighter script, faster pages. Simple Analytics' script is around 6 KB. sourcebeam's is under 1 KB — six times smaller. Both are negligible compared to Google Analytics' 45+ KB, but for teams chasing perfect Lighthouse scores and optimizing every millisecond of load time, the difference adds up. Especially on slow mobile connections in emerging markets.
Usage-based pricing that flexes with you. Simple Analytics uses fixed monthly plans. If your traffic is seasonal — high during launches, quiet during development sprints — you are paying the same amount regardless. sourcebeam's pay-as-you-go model means your analytics cost mirrors your actual traffic. A quiet month costs less. A viral post costs proportionally more, but you are never locked into a tier you do not need.
Under 1 KB. No npm packages. No build step.
| sourcebeam | Simple Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at $5/mo | ||
| Pay-as-you-go pricing | ||
| AI-ready API | ||
| Revenue tracking (Stripe) | ||
| Visitor journeys | ||
| Under 1KB script | ||
| Cookie-free tracking | ||
| No consent banner needed | ||
| One-line setup | ||
| Conversion goals | ||
| Real-time data | ||
| Public dashboards | ||
| Tweet viewer integration | ||
| Mini websites (link-in-bio) |
Simple Analytics offers public dashboards, tweet viewer integration, and mini websites — creative extras for content creators and open communities.
Simple Analytics is a great fit if you want to share your analytics publicly — they make it easy to create embeddable, public-facing dashboards. Their tweet viewer integration is also unique and useful for social-media-heavy brands. If you run an open source project or community site where transparency is a core value, their public dashboard feature is hard to beat.
But if you need to understand revenue impact, track visitor journeys to conversion, or query your analytics data with AI — sourcebeam is purpose-built for those use cases. Plans start at $5/month.
Starting at $5/month. Takes 30 seconds to set up.