Compare pricing, deployment, product fit, integrations, and capabilities side by side.
Site owners who need free, low-complexity traffic and real-user performance metrics rather than event funnels, replay, or product analytics
Important considerations: It focuses on aggregate traffic and performance metrics. It does not replace event-based product analytics, conversion funnels, session replay, heatmaps, or user-level journeys, and a Cloudflare account is required.
Website owners who want simple, privacy-focused analytics
Important considerations: Hosted use is donation-supported with a reasonable-use policy; high-volume or specialized deployments should be self-hosted.
| Attribute | Cloudflare Web Analytics | GoatCounter |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | A free, privacy-first web analytics and real-user monitoring service that measures visits, pageviews, page-load performance, and Core Web Vitals without cookies, local storage, fingerprinting, or data sampling. | A lightweight, privacy-aware open-source web analytics service with cookieless visit counting, referrers, campaigns, browser and location reports, exports, and JavaScript-free tracking options. |
| Pricing | Free; non-proxied sites are limited to 10 tracked sites, while proxied Cloudflare sites have no Web Analytics site limit | Hosted service is donation-supported and free for reasonable public use; self-hosting is free and open source |
| Deployment | Vendor-hosted cloud | Self-hosted and hosted options |
| Best for | Site owners who need free, low-complexity traffic and real-user performance metrics rather than event funnels, replay, or product analytics | Website owners who want simple, privacy-focused analytics |
| Operator | Cloudflare, Inc. Independent public company | Martin Tournoij Independent project |
| Company base | San Francisco, United States · United States | Ireland · European Union |
| Organization scale | 5,156 employees · operator, as of 31 Dec 2025 | 1 maintainers · operator, as of 13 Aug 2026 |
| Recent direction | operational reliability Recent official evidence shows a focus on operational reliability. | self-hosted expansion Recent official evidence shows a focus on self-hosted expansion. |
| Key features |
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| Important considerations | It focuses on aggregate traffic and performance metrics. It does not replace event-based product analytics, conversion funnels, session replay, heatmaps, or user-level journeys, and a Cloudflare account is required. | Hosted use is donation-supported with a reasonable-use policy; high-volume or specialized deployments should be self-hosted. |
| Integrations | Cloudflare dashboard, Cloudflare Pages, Google Tag Manager | Ghost, Hugo |
| Fact check | We checked this information against official vendor sources on 2026-08-09. | We checked this information against official vendor sources on 2026-08-27. |
This matrix shows capabilities recorded in our catalog. Not listed means we have not confirmed the capability here. Check the linked vendor sources for plan, deployment, and usage limits.
| Attribute | Cloudflare Web Analytics | GoatCounter |
|---|---|---|
| Audience insights | Listed | Listed |
| CCPA compliant | Not listed | Listed |
| Cookieless | Listed | Listed |
| Custom reports | Not listed | Listed |
| Data export | Not listed | Listed |
| Data ownership | Not listed | Listed |
| Event tracking | Not listed | Listed |
| Free plan | Listed | Listed |
| GDPR compliant | Not listed | Listed |
| Integrations | Not listed | Listed |
| Open source | Not listed | Listed |
| Privacy-first | Listed | Listed |
| Real-time data | Not listed | Listed |
| Self-hosted | Not listed | Listed |
| User segments | Not listed | Listed |
| Web analytics | Listed | Not listed |