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Frequently asked questions

• What is Matomo best at?

  Complete analytics with total data ownership. The free core covers goals, events, custom dimensions, ecommerce and realtime reports down to city level, funnels and heatmaps are available as add-ons, and On-Premise is GPLv3, unlimited and runs on your own servers. Pulsetic focuses on a different question: not what visitors did, but how fast the site was for them and whether it was up at all.

• How much does Matomo cost?

  Matomo Cloud starts at €29 a month (about $34) for 50,000 hits, priced in euros only, with a 21-day trial and no free cloud plan. On-Premise is free, but you host and maintain it, and add-ons are paid: Funnels $239 a year, Heatmaps and Session Recordings $269, Crash Analytics $189, SEO Web Vitals $99. Pulsetic starts free, and its $9 Solo plan includes 10,000 RUM pageviews a month plus 10 uptime monitors and status pages.

• Does Matomo show Core Web Vitals from real visitors?

  No. Matomo's SEO Web Vitals plugin pulls scores from Google's PageSpeed and CrUX APIs, which are lab and aggregate data, and it is a paid, on-premise-only add-on. Matomo's own page timings do come from real visitors, but as averages only, with no percentiles. Pulsetic records LCP, CLS, INP and FCP from every real visit and shows p50, p75 and p95 percentiles, on every plan.

• Is Matomo cookieless?

  Not by default. Matomo sets a _pk_id cookie that lasts 13 months plus a _pk_ses session cookie. You can opt in to cookieless tracking with disableCookies, at the cost of less accurate visitor counts. Pulsetic is cookieless by design: no cookies, no localStorage, no client-side identifier of any kind.

• Can Matomo tell me when my website is down?

  No. Matomo has no uptime monitoring, alerting or status pages; its own FAQ recommends using an external monitoring service. During an outage the dashboard just shows traffic dropping. Pulsetic checks your site every 30 seconds from up to 15 regions and alerts you via Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, email, SMS or phone call.

• Is Pulsetic a drop-in replacement for Matomo?

  No. Matomo is a full analytics suite with goals, events, funnels, heatmaps and ecommerce reporting, and Pulsetic tracks none of that. Pulsetic answers the performance and uptime questions instead, so the two can run side by side, and at under 4 KB Pulsetic's script adds almost nothing on top of Matomo's.

• Does Pulsetic's tracking script use cookies?

  No. Pulsetic sets no cookies, writes nothing to localStorage and has no client-side visitor identifier at all, because it does not need to count unique visitors. The script is under 4 KB and sends a single beacon per pageview, with no sampling. That is a fraction of Matomo's 22 KB gzipped core script, or 46 KB for the Cloud bundle.

• When should I switch from Matomo to Pulsetic?

  Switch is the wrong word if you rely on the suite: nothing else gives you goals, funnels, heatmaps and full data ownership the way Matomo does. Add Pulsetic alongside it for real-visitor Core Web Vitals, percentiles and uptime alerts. But if your Matomo install exists mainly to watch traffic and speed, moving to a hosted tool under 4 KB, from $9 with status pages included, is a lot less to maintain.