# fivebar vs Matomo

Matomo does nearly everything, and takes learning. fivebar does less, without cookies, on one page.

Matomo runs on your own server, or on its cloud. If you use a small part of it, this is what you’d gain and give up by moving to fivebar.

## No cookies to turn off

Matomo [sets cookies by default](https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_146/), among them one that remembers a visitor for 13 months. You can turn them off, and Matomo [warns](https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_157/) that doing so can make its reports less accurate. fivebar [sets no cookies](https://fiveb.ar/privacy/index.md) and keeps nothing in the visitor’s browser: it counts each visitor once a day, by a code made with a secret that’s replaced at midnight and never kept.

## One page to read

Matomo’s [guide to its reports](https://matomo.org/guide/reports/) runs to 25 sections. fivebar’s [dashboard](https://fiveb.ar/docs/panes.md) is one page: the figures and a chart, then pages, sources, countries, devices, goals and engagement, each a click from its full list. Speed, Errors and Bots are a page each beside it. Click nearly any row to filter the whole dashboard by it.

## Core Web Vitals

Matomo times page loads in your visitors’ browsers, in its [Page Performance](https://matomo.org/faq/page-performance-metrics/) report: the network, the server, the page’s own processing. Its Core Web Vitals come from a [plugin that asks Google’s PageSpeed Insights](https://matomo.org/faq/reports/configure-the-seo-web-vitals-feature/), for Matomo On-Premise alone. fivebar measures them in your visitors’ own browsers, LCP, INP and CLS beside TTFB, FCP and page load time, and rates each by Google’s thresholds on its [Speed page](https://fiveb.ar/docs/speed.md).

![fivebar’s Speed page for djangodocs.dev: six tiles, TTFB, FCP, LCP, INP, CLS and PLT, each rated, then LCP for each day against Google’s thresholds](https://fiveb.ar/img/vs/speed-light.webp?v=437afae7)

djangodocs.dev, whose stats are public, from 12 to 18 October 2026. One slow Sunday put its LCP past poor.

## Errors and bots

To count 404s in Matomo, you [add a line to your 404 template](https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/faq_60/) that renames the page, then look for it among your page titles. Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so the [Errors page](https://fiveb.ar/docs/error-pages.md) fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from.

Matomo [leaves out the bots](https://matomo.org/faq/new-to-piwik/faq_63/) it knows, with no report of what it left out, though it now reports on AI agents. fivebar counts every bot it leaves out on a [Bots page](https://fiveb.ar/docs/bots.md): how many pageviews, which pages, which networks, and why each was taken for a bot.

![fivebar’s Bots page for djangodocs.dev: 94 pageviews taken for bots, 30% of them all, by day, and why: a hosting network, an automated browser or a crawler](https://fiveb.ar/img/vs/bots-light.webp?v=af2f5515)

Nearly a third of djangodocs.dev’s pageviews that week were bots’, most of them from servers.

## Asking an app

Both have an MCP server. [Matomo’s](https://matomo.org/faq/how-to/how-to-configure-the-matomo-mcp-server/) is off until it’s switched on in your Matomo’s settings. fivebar’s is there for every account: add `https://fiveb.ar/api/mcp` to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any [app that takes one](https://fiveb.ar/docs/mcp.md), sign in and choose Allow.

## Prices

Matomo On-Premise is free, on a server you run and keep up to date. Matomo Cloud is priced by [hits](https://matomo.org/faq/general/what-is-a-hit/): pageviews, events, downloads, links out and site searches all count, so a site needs more hits than it has pageviews. Its Business plan holds 30 sites and 30 people; fivebar holds 1,024 sites, shared with whoever you like.

| Pageviews a month | fivebar | Matomo Cloud |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 10k | $5 | $26, for 50k hits |
| 100k | $13 | $42, for 100k hits |
| 1M | $50 | $204, for 1M hits |
| 10M | $165 | On request |

A month, in US dollars, from [fivebar’s prices](https://fiveb.ar/pricing/index.md) and [Matomo’s](https://matomo.org/pricing/), whose smallest plan is 50,000 hits. Both sell a year for the price of ten months.

## What Matomo has that fivebar doesn’t

A great deal, [by its own list](https://matomo.org/features/). Among it:

- **Self-hosting**, free, under the GPL.
- **Funnels, heatmaps, session recordings and A/B tests**, on Cloud, or as paid plugins on your own server.
- **Ecommerce**: orders, revenue and products.
- **Visitor profiles**: each visitor’s visits and what they did on them.
- **A tag manager**, and an [importer](https://plugins.matomo.org/GoogleAnalyticsImporter) for Google Analytics. fivebar can’t bring your history over yet.

## Switching

[Add fivebar’s tag](https://fiveb.ar/docs/install.md) beside Matomo’s, or through Matomo’s [Tag Manager](https://fiveb.ar/docs/platforms.md), and run both for a few weeks, so you have both counts for the same days before you take Matomo’s out. Where your pages push a [`trackEvent`](https://matomo.org/faq/reports/implement-event-tracking-with-matomo/) to `_paq`, call [`tally()`](https://fiveb.ar/docs/events.md) with its action as the event’s name, and its category, name and value as the data.

Checked on 19 October 2026, on Matomo’s own pages, each linked where it’s used.