Galytics vs Matomo

We will start by giving this one away. Of everything we compare ourselves against, Matomo is the only product that can do what we do: cookieless analytics and session recording, in one platform, in the EU. Anyone telling you otherwise, including an earlier version of our own homepage, has not checked.

So this page is narrower than the others, and mostly about cost and operational weight rather than capability.

Replay is a paid add-on, not part of the product

Session recording and heatmaps come from the Heatmap & Session Recording plugin on the Matomo Marketplace, bought separately from Matomo itself. So the comparison is not Galytics against Matomo, it is Galytics against Matomo plus a plugin, on whichever hosting you chose.

With Galytics, replay is in the same script as the analytics and on every plan, including the smallest and including the trial. There is nothing to add and nothing extra to buy.

Cookieless recording works, with documented caveats

Matomo's own plugin documentation is clear that recording normally sets a cookie:

When you record sessions, a first party cookie will be set for the duration of the visit named _pk_hsr.

You can turn cookies off, and they honour it:

the plugin will respect this setting and not set a cookie

with a consequence attached:

not all page views within a session may be recorded if you set a sample rate of lower than 100% or configure an entry page

Those two settings are optional, so a Matomo instance at full sample rate with no entry page configured does record cookielessly. Worth knowing rather than worth scaring you about. Galytics has no cookie to disable and no sample rate to get wrong, because it never had one.

The real difference is how much of it you run

Matomo is a large platform. Self-host it and you own a database, upgrades, archiving cron jobs, and the performance tuning that goes with a growing dataset. Take Matomo Cloud instead and you have someone else running it, at which point you are comparing prices on features you may not use.

That size is also a genuine advantage: Matomo has tag management, A/B testing, funnels, form analytics, roll-up reporting and a plugin ecosystem. We have none of that and are not trying to.

Side by side

When Matomo is the better call

More often than on any other page here. If you want to self-host, if you need tag management or A/B testing or funnels, if open source is a requirement, or if you already run Matomo well, stay with it. It is a serious product and it will do more than we will.

Galytics is the better call when you want one hosted script that covers the numbers and the sessions, on one bill, with nothing to install, configure or keep upgrading.

Sources

• Does Heatmap & Session Recording set any cookies?
• Heatmap & Session Recording on the Matomo Marketplace

Checked August 2026. If any of this has changed, tell us and we will correct the page.