How long does each analytics tool keep your data? The aggregate-forever vs raw-data trade-off
If you're searching for how long your analytics tool keeps your data, the short answer depends on a distinction most tools never explain: raw per-visit data (one row per individual visit, often tied to an identifier) versus aggregate stats (daily totals — views, visitors, top pages). GA4 keeps user- and event-level data for 2 months by default, 14 months at most on a standard property; Plausible keeps aggregate stats 3 years (Starter/Growth) to 5 years (Business); Fathom keeps data forever; Simple Analytics keeps 30 days on its free plan and full history on paid; and Simplytics deletes raw visit rows nightly but keeps aggregate stats forever.
Here's the insight that ties it together: the raw data is the clock. Per-visit rows are the part with a retention limit, because they're large and they're a privacy liability. Aggregates are tiny and non-personal. Simplytics inverts the usual arrangement — it throws the raw rows away every night and keeps the aggregates indefinitely. You can keep history forever because you threw the raw data away.
Raw data vs aggregates — why the difference decides everything
A raw visit record is one row per visit: a timestamp, a page, often a visitor identifier, plus whatever dimensions were captured. These rows are how a tool can later answer questions like "show me every visit from Germany on mobile in March." They're also the rows that make a dataset personal data — they can describe an individual's path through your site.
An aggregate is a count: "2026-03-14 — 412 views, 318 visitors, top page /pricing." No individuals, just totals per dimension. A year of aggregates for a busy site is kilobytes. A year of raw rows is millions of records.
So retention policies almost always set a clock on the raw rows, not the aggregates, for two reasons: storage cost, and liability. The longer you hold raw per-visit data, the more you store and the more personal data you're responsible for. That clock is why GA4's user-level history runs out at 14 months even though its aggregated standard reports persist — once the raw events age out, you can no longer build a new Exploration over that period.
What each tool keeps
| Tool | Raw visit data | Aggregate / report history | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplytics | Deleted nightly (worst case under ~48h) | Forever | Cookie-less; $1/month |
| GA4 | User/event-level: 2 months default, 14 months max (50 months only on Analytics 360) | Aggregated standard reports persist; Explorations bounded by raw window | Free; cookies + consent |
| Plausible | None (privacy-first, no raw personal data) | 3 years (Starter/Growth), 5 years (Business) | From $9/mo |
| Fathom | Forever | Forever | From $15/mo; cookie-less |
| Simple Analytics | — | 30 days (free), full history (paid) | Paid from $20/mo; cookie-less |
| Matomo | Configurable — can keep raw logs; auto-deletion is opt-in (self-hosted default keeps them) | Processed reports can be kept indefinitely | Full control; Cloud ~€29/mo for 50k hits |
A few of these deserve their honest credit. Fathom keeps aggregates forever too — same long-term outcome as Simplytics on the history question. Plausible's 3–5 year window is genuinely generous, and like Simplytics it holds no raw personal data. Matomo gives you the most control of any tool here — you decide what raw data to keep and for how long. The point of the table isn't that one tool retains more than everyone else. It's that the tools differ on what they retain and what that costs you, in money and in liability.
How Simplytics' nightly deletion actually works
Simplytics records raw per-visit rows (events and sessions) during the day for one job: deduplicating unique visitors within that day. Once a local day is complete, those rows are wiped. The in-progress local day is kept so that cross-timezone dedup doesn't break — which means worst-case raw-row lifetime is under ~48 hours. After that, what remains is the aggregate daily totals: views, visitors, sessions, and every dimension, kept forever.
One nuance worth stating plainly, because funnels need some notion of a path: the page-journey records used for funnels (the "transitions" table) drop the visitor identifier once their day is over, and the records themselves are deleted after 90 days. So even the funnel data carries no per-visitor identity beyond the day it happened. Data is stored in the EU (Warsaw).
The result is a tool that can show you a five-year traffic trend while holding essentially no historical personal data. The trend lives in the aggregates; the liability was in the raw rows, and those are gone by morning.
The honest trade-off: what you give up
This is the cost, and it's real. Because Simplytics deletes raw rows, you cannot slice the past in ways you didn't plan for. If you didn't aggregate a dimension at collection time, that detail is gone — you can't retroactively add a new segment to historical data, run an ad-hoc query over individual past visits, or build a brand-new custom report on old raw events.
Tools that keep raw data buy you exactly that flexibility. GA4 (within its 2–14 month window) and Matomo (for as long as you choose to retain logs) let you go back and ask a question of the past that you didn't think to ask at the time. If "re-analyze last quarter's raw visits along a dimension I just thought of" is a workflow you need, a pre-aggregated tool is the wrong choice and you should know that before you switch.
What you get in exchange is long-term trend history with almost no privacy surface area: you keep the thing most site owners actually look at — visitors, pages, referrers, channels over time — without keeping the rows that make a breach or a subject-access request painful.
Where the price comes in
Retention is partly a billing decision. Longer raw-data history costs the vendor storage, and that shows up in tiers. Plausible's 5-year window sits on its $19/mo Business plan; GA4's longer windows mean its data model and, ultimately, Analytics 360; Simple Analytics' full history starts at $20/mo; Fathom's forever-aggregates start at $15/mo; Matomo Cloud is around €29/mo for 50k hits.
Simplytics keeps aggregate history forever at $1/month (or $10/year), with 50,000 pageviews/month, up to 12 websites, a ~1.9 KB gzipped script (how that compares), and a 30-day free trial, no card. The honest framing: Simplytics is among the cheapest privacy-friendly analytics tools that keep aggregate history forever, at $1/month — a lot of functionality for a lot less money than the $9–15/month of the privacy-first competitors, achieved partly by keeping the least raw data, not the most.
The short version
Most tools put a clock on raw per-visit data because that's the part that's large and personal. GA4's clock is 2–14 months; Plausible holds aggregates 3–5 years; Fathom keeps everything forever; Simple Analytics' free tier holds only 30 days; Matomo lets you decide. Simplytics deletes raw rows nightly and keeps aggregates forever — long-term trends with minimal liability — for $1/month.
If long-term trend history matters more to you than re-querying old raw visits, that trade is a good one. If it doesn't, keep a tool that retains raw data — just know what window it gives you. The comparisons lay out the full picture, including where each tool wins: Simplytics vs Google Analytics, vs Plausible, vs Fathom, and vs Matomo.
Competitor retention figures and pricing reflect each vendor's published docs as of June 21, 2026. If a vendor changes its policy, email us and we'll update this post.