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Little Friend compared.

Smaller, cookieless, and it sees the bots. Pick the tool you use today.

Head to head

  • Google Analytics 4

    Google's analytics suite, linked to Google Ads.

    Where Little Friend pulls ahead: a script under 4 KB, no cookies, crawlers and AI agents in their own report, and goals your server confirms.

    Little Friend vs Google Analytics

  • Plausible Analytics

    A small, cookieless web analytics script.

    Where Little Friend pulls ahead: crawlers and AI agents in their own report, a door that decides which get in, journeys and session replay, and an official MCP server.

    Little Friend vs Plausible

  • Fathom Analytics

    A cookieless web analytics script with the same features on every plan.

    Where Little Friend pulls ahead: crawlers and AI agents in their own report, a door that decides which get in, journeys and funnels, goals your server confirms, and an MCP server.

    Little Friend vs Fathom

How we measured script size.

On September 25, 2026 we downloaded each script uncompressed and compressed it with gzip at level 9, the same way we measure our own. Real transfer sizes vary a little with the server's compression settings.

Gzipped size of each analytics script
ToolSize, gzip
Google Analytics 4gtag.js for a real GA4 property163 to 181 KB
PostHogarray.js, the file the snippet loads95.9 KB
Little Friendlf.js, measured at build3.27 KB
Fathomscript.js2.0 KB
Plausiblescript.js, the default script1.2 KB
Gzip sizes, measured September 25, 2026, with 1 KB as 1,024 bytes. Google Analytics shows the range across eight real sites. Little Friend's comes from the built lf.js. How we measured
ToolFileUncompressedGzip
Google Analytics 4https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-…Eight public GA4 properties measured: kubernetes.io, prometheus.io, etcd.io, istio.io, argo-cd.readthedocs.io, envoyproxy.io, opentelemetry.io, containerd.io. The tag's size depends on each property's settings. With no measurement ID the base library is 88,774 bytes gzip, but no site loads it that way.494,823 bytes162.8 KB to 181.3 KB166,727 to 185,687 bytes
PostHoghttps://us-assets.i.posthog.com/static/array.jsRecording, surveys and other features can load more files on demand. We measured only the first one.313,792 bytes95.9 KB98,204 bytes
Fathomhttps://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js6,981 bytes2.0 KB2,083 bytes
Plausiblehttps://plausible.io/js/script.jsPlausible also offers per-site script variants. We measured the default.2,841 bytes1.2 KB1,279 bytes

Sources.

  1. Google: known bot-traffic exclusion
  2. Google: explorations (funnels, paths)
  3. Google: Measurement Protocol
  4. Google Analytics overview
  5. PostHog: bot and traffic detection
  6. PostHog: persistence and cookies
  7. PostHog: product analytics
  8. PostHog: pricing
  9. Fathom: features
  10. Fathom: pricing
  11. Plausible: features and pricing
  12. Plausible: Events API

Checked September 25, 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.