GoatCounter vs. Piwik PRO

Last verified 33 days ago · 33 sources · Updated automatically

GoatCounter and Piwik PRO 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.

Founded2019

HQ Dublin, Ireland

Visit GoatCounter Full profile

Piwik PRO

Enterprise-grade, privacy-focused analytics and customer data platform with GDPR compliance.

Founded2013

HQ Wrocław, Poland

Visit Piwik PRO Full profile

Attribute

GoatCounter

Piwik PRO

Company facts

Headquarters

Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.

Wrocław, Poland

Employees

1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.

190 Vendor about page states 'nearly 200 people'; third-party sources (LinkedIn, Pitchbook) show ~159–160 as of late 2025.

Pricing

Starting Monthly Price (USD)

—

$40.38 Entry Business plan starts at €35/month; converted at 1.1537 EUR/USD (rate on 2026-06-10). No USD list price published.

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.

Free Core plan was discontinued March 2026; only a 30-day trial is available.

Free Trial Length (Days)

0 days No paid plan exists, so no trial applies. The hosted service is entirely free.

30 days

Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)

—

2M Piwik PRO meters 'actions' (not pageviews); 2M actions/month on the entry Business plan.

Entry Plan Website Limit

—

20 sites Business plan includes up to 20 domains at the base tier; price adjusts based on domain count.

Analytics capabilities

Real-Time Dashboard

Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.

Yes

Custom Event Tracking

Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.

Yes

Goal / Conversion Tracking

No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.

Yes

Funnels

No multi-step funnel analysis.

Yes

Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking

No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.

Yes

Heatmaps

GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.

Heatmaps (click, scroll maps) are part of the Piwik PRO Analytics Suite via built-in Tag Manager; visualized through the official Site Inspector Chrome extension.

Privacy & compliance

Cookieless Tracking

No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.

Cookieless tracking is a fully supported optional mode; can be enabled per site via Administration settings.

Consent Banner Required

GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.

Default configuration uses cookies and requires consent. With cookieless/anonymous mode enabled, no consent banner is needed — but that requires explicit configuration.

GDPR Compliant

Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.

Yes

EU Data Residency

Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.

EU data residency is available; Business plan is hosted on EU servers in Sweden (Elastx). Enterprise offers 60+ Azure regions including EU.

Data ownership & deployment

Open Source

GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.

License

EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.

proprietary

Self-Hostable

Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.

Traditional on-premise/self-hosted deployment is no longer offered. 'Private cloud' (installation in customer's own Azure subscription) is available on Enterprise plans.

Data Retention (Months)

—

25 mo

Unlimited Data Retention

Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.

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.

Historical GA data cannot be imported. A settings/configuration migration tool (GA3 + GTM) existed but was discontinued April 2025; no data import path exists.

Raw Data Export

Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.

Raw session and event data available via Reporting API at no extra cost; daily CSV raw data export is a paid add-on.

Platform & integrations

Has API

REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.

Yes

Tracking Script Size (KB)

3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.

26.6 KB Compressed (over-the-wire) size of ppms.js (standalone analytics library). Full container including Tag Manager + Consent Manager is ~60.6 KB compressed.

Official WordPress Plugin

Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).

Yes

Email Reports

Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.

Yes

Public Dashboard Sharing

Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).

Publicly shareable links available for dashboards and standard reports (not custom reports). Links are valid for 90 days and marked as an experimental feature.

The verdict

GoatCounter

Best for free, privacy-first basic analytics

GoatCounter's hosted service is free with no paid plan, versus Piwik PRO starting at $40.38/mo. It is open source (EUPL-1.2) and self-hostable, ships a 3 KB script against Piwik PRO's 26.6 KB, and skips the consent banner by default. It can import Google Analytics data and retains data indefinitely. The trade-off: no goals, funnels, ecommerce, or heatmaps.

Full profile

Piwik PRO

Best for conversion, funnel, and ecommerce analysis

Piwik PRO adds goal and conversion tracking, funnels, ecommerce revenue tracking, and heatmaps that GoatCounter lacks entirely. The entry Business plan covers 2M actions across 20 sites at $40.38/mo with a 30-day trial. The trade-off versus GoatCounter: no free tier, proprietary and not self-hostable, 25-month retention rather than unlimited, no GA import, and a consent banner by default.

Full profile

Sources · 33 verified references

goatcounter.com piwik.pro arp242.net github.com help.piwik.pro developers.piwik.pro + 3 more

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