Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. Google Analytics
GoatCounter and Google Analytics compared across Company facts, Pricing, Analytics capabilities, Privacy & compliance, Data ownership & deployment and Platform & integrations — every fact sourced and re-verified from each vendor's public material.
GoatCounter
Open-source, privacy-friendly web analytics that tracks no personal data.
Google Analytics
Free web and app analytics platform by Google with audience and conversion insights.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
Mountain View, CA Google's main campus (Googleplex) is in Mountain View, CA. GA4 is a Google product.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
190.8k Alphabet/Google had ~190,820 full-time employees at year-end 2025 per company reporting.
Pricing
Offers Free Tier
GoatCounter.com is offered free for personal websites and small-to-medium businesses. No paid plans exist; the project is donation-supported.
GA4 standard is entirely free to use with no time limit. Google Analytics 360 is the paid enterprise tier.
Free Trial Length (Days)
0 days No paid plan exists, so no trial applies. The hosted service is entirely free.
0 days No free trial needed — GA4 standard is permanently free. No paid plan exists at entry level.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
Realtime report shows active users in last 5 and 30 minutes, events, sources, and pages as they happen.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
Custom events tracked via gtag('event', '<name>', {params}) or Google Tag Manager on any plan.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Any event can be marked as a key event (conversion); GA4 reports key-event counts and rates by source, medium, and campaign.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
Funnel Exploration (in Explore) supports up to 10 steps with per-step drop-off rates, open and closed funnel modes.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
Native ecommerce reporting includes revenue by transaction, purchase journey, checkout journey, and monetization overview.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
GA4 has no built-in click/scroll heatmap feature. Heatmaps require a separate third-party tool (e.g. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity).
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
GA4 uses first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_<id>) by default. Cookieless operation is not a supported mode.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
GA4 sets cookies and processes personal data; GDPR/ePrivacy require a consent banner for EU users.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
Google states it operates as a GDPR data processor for GA4, with Data Processing Terms, ISO 27001, and consent tooling.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
EU traffic is initially collected on EU servers but is then forwarded to Google Analytics processing servers globally; data is not stored exclusively in the EU.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
GA4 is a proprietary cloud service. No source code is publicly available.
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
proprietary GA4 is a closed-source cloud product. API client libraries are Apache 2.0 but the platform is proprietary.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
GA4 is cloud-only with no self-hosting option. All data is sent to Google's servers.
Data Retention (Months)
—
14 mo Free GA4 properties can choose 2 or 14 months retention for user/event-level data; 14 months is the maximum on the free tier.
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
Free GA4 caps retention at 14 months for user/event-level data. No unlimited/forever retention option on any GA4 tier.
Google Analytics Import
Google Analytics report import added in v2.6.0 (Jun 2025). Limited to path-level totals due to GA's export constraints.
GA4 cannot import historical Universal Analytics analytics data. Data Import covers external business data (cost, item, user, offline events) only — not migrating legacy GA report history.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
Raw event-level data exportable to BigQuery (free sandbox available); daily and streaming export modes. Data API also available.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
GA4 Data API (v1) enables programmatic querying of analytics data with runReport, runRealtimeReport, and more.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
135.7 KB gtag.js baseline payload; varies with property configuration.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
Site Kit by Google is an official Google-published WordPress plugin that includes GA4 integration.
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
GA4 admins can schedule up to 50 reports for email delivery (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) in PDF or CSV format.
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
GA4 reports cannot be shared publicly without a Google account. Share links require recipients to have GA property access.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for privacy-first, lightweight tracking
GoatCounter tracks without cookies and needs no consent banner, where GA4 sets first-party cookies and requires one. Its 3 KB script versus GA4's 135.7 KB, EU-only data residency, open-source EUPL-1.2 code with self-hosting, unlimited retention versus GA4's 14-month cap, and public dashboard sharing favor sites that want minimal, owner-controlled analytics.
Full profile Google Analytics Best for conversion, funnel, and revenue analysis
GA4 adds goal/conversion tracking, up-to-10-step funnel exploration with drop-off rates, and native ecommerce revenue reporting — all of which GoatCounter lacks, being a pageview/event counter. For sites that need to measure conversions, multi-step journeys, or transaction revenue, GA4 covers analysis GoatCounter does not.
Full profileSources · 34 verified references
goatcounter.com about.google arp242.net macrotrends.net marketingplatform.google.com github.com + 5 more
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