fivebar vs Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics has an AI chat of its own. fivebar lets the AI you already use read your stats, and counts how fast your pages load and which ones fail.
Simple Analytics and fivebar both count without cookies, keep their data in the EU and fit a site’s stats on one page, and Simple Analytics keeps no identifier for a visitor at all, not even for a day. The differences are in what else each one tells you, and who you ask about it.
Your AI, or theirs
Simple Analytics has an AI chat in its dashboard, which answers questions about your stats once you agree to it sending them to OpenAI. It doesn’t offer an MCP server of its own.
fivebar has no chat of its own. It lets the AI you already use read your stats instead: add
https://fiveb.ar/api/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor or any of the
apps that take an MCP server, sign in and choose Allow. The app answers with fivebar’s rules
about what each figure means, beside anything else it’s connected to, such as your code or your inbox, and if you
tick a box, adds goals and changes settings when you ask it to.
How fast your pages load
Simple Analytics doesn’t time your pages: nothing it collects is a load time. fivebar’s tag also times every page load in your visitors’ own browsers, and the Speed page rates each measure by Google’s thresholds, the Core Web Vitals among them, with the pages that load slowest listed first.
Where visits came from
Simple Analytics lists referrers, and your campaign tags beside them, with no channels. fivebar groups every visit into channels, Google’s own, by its source and its campaign tags: Organic Search, Email, AI Assistants for visits from ChatGPT, Claude and the like, and the rest.
Errors and bots
For 404s, Simple Analytics has a script in beta that sends each as an event, if the page says 404, on a plan with events. Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so the Errors page fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from.
Both keep bots out of your figures. Simple Analytics hides them from the dashboard, and lets you download them. fivebar counts them on a Bots page: how many pageviews, which pages, which networks, and why each was taken for a bot.
Prices
Simple Analytics’ plan with prices, Simple, is priced by pageviews and events, for up to 10 sites and one person, with $20 a month for each other person. fivebar’s plan holds 1,024 sites, and you can share each one with whoever you like at no cost. Both sell a year for the price of ten months.
| Pageviews a month | fivebar | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| 10k | $5 | $15 |
| 100k | $13 | $20 |
| 1M | $50 | $60 |
| 10M | $165 | $160 |
| 50M | $650 | $800 |
A month, in US dollars, from fivebar’s prices and Simple Analytics’, which adds $16 for each million past 10M. Its free plan has no events, goals or API, keeps 30 days and asks for a badge on your site.
What Simple Analytics has that fivebar doesn’t
- No identifier at all. Simple Analytics doesn’t recognise a returning visitor, even on the same day: its visitors are pageviews from another site, or from none. fivebar tells one visitor from another within a day, by a code made with a secret that’s replaced at midnight and never kept, and counts visitor-days.
- An importer for Google Analytics 4. fivebar can’t bring your history over yet.
- Funnels, as goals of several steps.
- A free plan, for up to 5 sites.
- Apps for iPhone and Mac, with widgets (features).
Switching
Add fivebar’s tag beside Simple Analytics’, and run both for a few weeks, so you
have both counts for the same days before you take theirs out. Expect different visitors: theirs count pageviews
arriving from elsewhere, fivebar’s each visitor once a day. Where your pages call sa_event(), call
tally() with the same name, and its
metadata as the data.
Checked on 19 October 2026, on Simple Analytics’ own pages, each linked where it’s used.