Web analytics · Martin Tournoij (independent open-source project)

GoatCounter

Single-developer open-source analytics, free for reasonable public use hosted or fully self-hosted, no numeric price tiers.

Visit GoatCounter Alternatives

GoatCounter is an open-source (EUPL-1.2) web analytics tool maintained by an individual developer rather than a company. It is offered both as a donation-supported hosted service at goatcounter.com, with data stored on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany, and as a fully self-hostable application (the complete backend and dashboard, not just a tracking snippet). The hosted service is free for "reasonable" personal or small-to-medium business use under an honor-system policy rather than metered pricing tiers; there is no separate paid plan, only optional GitHub Sponsors donations. It identifies unique visits without cookies or persistent personal data and needs no GDPR consent notice. Compared to feature-rich competitors, GoatCounter stays deliberately minimal: browser, location, screen-size and referrer/campaign stats, with a lightweight (~3.5KB) script, pixel, middleware, or log-file integration.

At a glance

Vendor Martin Tournoij (independent open-source project)
Pricing model Free
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud, Self-hosted
Open source Yes (EUPL-1.2)
Best for Individual site owners, developers, and small teams wanting a free-to-self-host, single-maintainer tool without commercial pricing tiers.

Pricing

The hosted goatcounter.com service is free for reasonable public/personal or small-to-medium business use (no published price tiers or hard limits), sustained by voluntary GitHub Sponsors donations; self-hosting is free and unrestricted.

Plan Price Notes
Hosted (goatcounter.com) Free for reasonable public usage; personal sites or small-to-medium businesses; no automated enforcement of a commercial cutoff
Self-hosted Free (open source) run your own instance for any purpose, including high-volume or commercial use

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Cookieless unique-visitor identification with no persistent personal data storage
  • No GDPR consent notice required per vendor
  • Lightweight script (~3.5KB) plus JavaScript-free tracking-pixel option
  • Server-side/middleware integration and log-file import as alternatives to the JS snippet
  • Browser, location, screen-size, referrer and campaign tracking
  • Full data export and account cancellation at any time
  • High-priority accessibility support (screen readers)
  • Fully self-hostable, complete open-source codebase on GitHub

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Counter Minimalist AGPL-licensed analytics showing only daily unique visitors and referrals, self-hostable, pay-what-you-want. Pirsch Analytics German/EU-hosted cookieless web analytics SaaS with usage-based pricing and an open-source Go tracking core. Umami MIT-licensed, open-source analytics that can be self-hosted for free or run on Umami Cloud, billed on events rather than pageviews. Plausible Analytics Lightweight, privacy-focused, open-source web analytics with a simple single-page dashboard and no cookies.

GoatCounter in the index now

Terms to know

First-party data Data a company collects directly from its own customers and properties, rather than acquiring it from outside sources. Consent mode A Google framework that adjusts how its tags behave based on a visitor's cookie consent choices. Session A grouped window of a user's activity on a site or app, bounded by an inactivity timeout or similar cutoff rule. UTM parameters Tags added to a URL that record which source, medium, and campaign sent a visitor to a site. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) The European Union's comprehensive data protection law governing how personal data of people in the EU is collected and used. Personally identifiable information (PII) Any data that can identify a specific individual, alone or combined with other information, and is subject to privacy regulation.