Happy Valley

Matomo vs Salience

Matomo and Salience are both analytics tools. Matomo is aimed at enterprise and agencies, while Salience is aimed at agencies and small businesses. Both have a free plan.

Matomo

Full-featured, self-hostable analytics

Salience

Log analytics that shows how bots, AI crawlers and users hit your site

PricingOpen sourceFreemium · $19
Starting priceNot published$19/mo
Free planYesYes
Free trial——
Built forEnterprise, AgenciesAgencies, Small businesses, E-commerce, Developers, Enterprise
Platformswebweb
CountryNZ · 2007GB · 2026
Rating——

Choose Matomo if

Organizations that need GA-level depth with full data control and compliance.

  • Deepest feature set among privacy-first tools
  • 100% data ownership and self-hosting
  • Trusted by public sector organizations

Look elsewhere if: Teams wanting a simple dashboard (Plausible, Fathom, Umami).

Choose Salience if

Technical SEO teams and agencies that want continuous log analysis of search and AI crawler traffic.

  • Shows real crawler behaviour that JavaScript analytics never sees
  • Free plan includes the API and MCP server
  • Works on Cloudflare's free plan through a Worker

Look elsewhere if: Marketers who only need visitor analytics or a site crawler (Plausible, Screaming Frog SEO Spider).

Matomo vs Salience pricing

Matomo

  • On-Premise$0GPL, self-hosted; premium plugin bundles extra
  • Cloud Business29/mo50k hits/mo, 30 websites, 30 users; excl. tax
  • Cloud EnterpriseCustomCustom limits, CSM, SAML/LDAP

Salience

  • Free$01 site, 500K requests/mo, 30 days of history
  • Solo$19/mo1 site, 1 user, 5M requests, 6 months history; 2 months free yearly
  • Starter$49/mo5 sites, 20M requests, 1 year history, webhooks; 2 months free yearly
  • Growth$149/mo15 sites, 100M requests, 2 years history; 2 months free yearly
  • Pro$499/mo50 sites, 500M requests, 4 years history, shared Slack support

Matomo · Key features

  • Full web analytics with custom dimensions and reports
  • Heatmaps, session recordings and form analytics (premium)
  • Funnels, A/B testing and ecommerce tracking
  • Built-in tag manager
  • Cookieless and consent-aware configurations
  • On-premise or cloud; GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA tooling

Cons

  • Dated interface
  • Premium plugins add cost on-premise
  • Performance tuning needed at scale

Salience · Key features

  • Analysis of every request from CDN or server logs, with no sampling by Salience
  • Crawler verification against official IP ranges to expose spoofed user agents
  • Recognition of 200+ bots, with AI crawlers grouped by training, search or user fetch
  • Requests linked to paths, status codes, sitemaps, robots.txt rules and index state
  • Alerts checked every minute; Slack from Solo, webhooks from Starter
  • REST API, CLI and MCP server on every plan, including Free

Cons

  • Company incorporated in August 2026, so there is little track record
  • Core data is hosted in AWS London (eu-west-2), with no other region offered
  • Vercel needs a Pro or Enterprise team and Netlify works only on Enterprise

Matomo vs Salience: FAQ

Do Matomo and Salience have a free plan?

Yes, both Matomo and Salience have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Which is better for small businesses, Matomo or Salience?

Salience lists small businesses as a core audience, while Matomo is aimed more at enterprise and agencies.

Not sure yet?