I tested 8 analytics tools. Here's what they all get wrong.

I spent the last 6 months deep in web analytics while building my own platform. Along the way I tested GA4, Hotjar, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Plausible, Fathom, PostHog, and Matomo. Every single one forces you into a tradeoff that shouldn't exist. Here's the short version. GA4 — Free, but requires a certification to find basic data. Filtering for a single page takes 6 clicks. Reports are sampled above 10M events with error rates up to 30%. Cookie consent banners make 40-60% of your EU traffic invisible. The "free" tool effectively requires BigQuery for anything useful. Hotjar — Great heatmaps, but the script adds ~830ms to your page load and ~0.5MB to page weight. The free plan records 35 sessions per day. Full Business tier across all products costs $922/mo. Session recordings break on Next.js and React apps when CSS filenames change between deploys. Mixpanel — Powerful product analytics, but 10M events/month costs ~$2,500/mo. One HN user reported getting downgraded from 20M free events to