RUM vs Page Analytics Cost 2026
RUM (Real User Monitoring) and page analytics (Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, Matomo) get confused in procurement. They're different products with different buyers and different cost models. Here's the boundary.
The question each product answers
Page analytics answers: How many people visited? Where did they come from? What did they do? Did they convert? Are conversions trending up or down? These are marketing and product questions.
RUM answers: How fast did the page load for real users? What are the Core Web Vitals across the visitor population? Are there JavaScript errors? Which browsers / devices / geographies have the worst experience? These are engineering and operations questions.
The buyer for page analytics is typically marketing, growth, or product analytics. The buyer for RUM is typically engineering, SRE, or platform. The two products often coexist in the same organisation, owned by different teams, with no overlap in usage.
Cost comparison at 1M monthly sessions
| Tool | Category | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics 4 | Page analytics | Free |
| Plausible Analytics | Page analytics | ~$59 |
| Fathom Analytics | Page analytics | ~$54 |
| Matomo Cloud | Page analytics | ~$95 |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Hybrid (pageview + CWV) | Free |
| Datadog RUM | RUM | ~$4,500 |
| Sentry Team + replay | RUM | ~$200 |
The overlap is shallow
Both product categories capture pageview counts. That's where the overlap ends. Page analytics adds conversion tracking, attribution modelling, audience segmentation, A/B test integration, marketing-campaign integration. RUM adds Core Web Vitals, JavaScript errors, network timing, session replay, alert workflows.
Teams sometimes try to use page analytics for performance (looking at GA4's Site Speed report) or RUM for marketing (asking Datadog to show conversion rates by traffic source). Neither works well, the products are optimised for very different questions.
When you need both
Almost every commercial site needs both. A typical setup:
- Page analytics (GA4 free or Plausible/Fathom for privacy-focused) for marketing and growth team.
- RUM (one of the 18 in our matrix) for engineering and SRE team.
- Cloudflare Web Analytics (free) can replace page analytics for basic pageview + Core Web Vitals if simplicity matters more than depth.
When one tool covers both
Cloudflare Web Analytics is the only tool we cover that genuinely covers both basic page analytics AND basic Core Web Vitals capture, for free. For very small sites with simple needs, it's the cheapest acceptable answer to both questions. For anything beyond Core Web Vitals + pageview counts, you need separate tools.