Adjust vs Simple Analytics

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner (MMP) founded in Berlin in 2012 and acquired by AppLovin in 2021 in a deal valued at about $1 billion. It tells app marketers which ad networks, campaigns and creatives drove installs, in-app events and revenue, so budget can move to the channels that actually pay back. Its SDK runs inside iOS, Android and Unity apps.

The platform covers attribution and deep linking, Datascape dashboards and cohort reporting, a Fraud Prevention Suite that blocks click spam and fake installs, and support for Apple's SKAdNetwork and AdAttributionKit privacy frameworks. Add-on modules include InSight for incrementality testing with synthetic control groups, Audience Builder, CTV AdVision for connected-TV campaigns and SpendWorks for ad-spend mapping. The free Base plan covers up to 1,500 attributions per month; Core and Enterprise are custom-priced annual contracts.

Adjust suits app publishers, games studios and fintech or ecommerce apps with real paid user-acquisition budgets. AppsFlyer is its biggest rival with a larger partner ecosystem, while Singular leans harder into cost aggregation. Northbeam and Rockerbox, also in our catalog, solve web and DTC attribution rather than app installs, so they are not like-for-like replacements.

In May 2025 Adjust launched Growth Copilot in beta, an AI assistant that answers reporting questions in plain language and, with Pulse, can publish scheduled AI reports. When negotiating, ask for fraud prevention to be bundled, since it is often quoted as a separate add-on.

Simple Analytics is a privacy-first web analytics service founded in 2018 by Adriaan van Rossum and based in the Netherlands. It collects no cookies, IP addresses or personal data and does not fingerprint visitors, so it is designed to comply with GDPR, PECR and similar laws without a consent banner, and data is stored in the EU.

The dashboard shows pageviews, visitors, referrers, UTM campaigns, countries, devices and time on page, with goals and events for conversions. Its distinguishing features are an AI assistant that answers questions about your data in plain language and builds charts, plus options to share dashboards publicly, export raw data and query everything through an API. Plans are priced by monthly pageviews: a free plan for hobby sites, a self-serve plan from 20 dollars a month for 100,000 pageviews that scales with traffic and extra users, and Enterprise with an assisted trial.

Simple Analytics fits EU companies, privacy-focused publishers and teams that want clear traffic reporting with a strong compliance story. It lacks funnels, retention cohorts and user-level product analytics, segmentation is limited, and it costs more than self-hosting a free tool such as Umami. Plausible and Fathom are the closest paid alternatives with a similar philosophy, Matomo offers a fuller feature set with self-hosting, and PostHog suits teams that need product analytics rather than website statistics.