GoatCounter vs. Plausible Analytics

Last verified 33 days ago · 33 sources · Updated automatically

GoatCounter and Plausible 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.

Founded2019

HQ Dublin, Ireland

Visit GoatCounter Full profile

Plausible Analytics

Open-source, privacy-first web analytics — a lightweight, cookieless Google Analytics alternative.

Founded2018

HQ EU (remote-first)

Visit Plausible Analytics Full profile

Attribute

GoatCounter

Plausible Analytics

Company facts

Headquarters

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

EU (remote-first)

Employees

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

Pricing

Starting Monthly Price (USD)

—

$9 Starter plan at $9/mo (monthly billing); 10k pageviews, 1 site

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.

Plausible Community Edition (CE) is a free self-hostable open-source version

Free Trial Length (Days)

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

30 days 30-day free trial on all paid plans, no credit card required

Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)

—

10k Starter plan includes up to 10k monthly pageviews

Entry Plan Website Limit

—

1 sites Starter plan covers 1 site; Growth allows up to 3, Business up to 10

Analytics capabilities

Real-Time Dashboard

Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.

Real-time dashboard updates every 30 seconds

Custom Event Tracking

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

Custom event tracking available via JS snippet, CSS class, or Events API

Goal / Conversion Tracking

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

Supports pageview goals and custom event goals with conversion rate reporting

Funnels

No multi-step funnel analysis.

Funnel analysis is a Business plan feature ($19/mo+)

Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking

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

Revenue tracking (monetary values on events) is a Business plan feature ($19/mo+)

Heatmaps

GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.

Privacy & compliance

Cookieless Tracking

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

No cookies or persistent identifiers used by default; daily-rotating anonymous hash only

Consent Banner Required

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

No cookie banner needed — Plausible collects no personal data and sets no cookies

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.

Data stored in Falkenstein, Germany on Hetzner servers; CDN via Bunny (Slovenia)

Data ownership & deployment

Open Source

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

Community Edition (CE) is AGPLv3; cloud product is built on same open-source codebase

License

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

AGPLv3

Self-Hostable

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

Plausible Community Edition (CE) is officially supported for self-hosting

Data Retention (Months)

—

36 mo Starter and Growth plans retain 3 years (36 months) of data; Business/Enterprise retain 5+ years

Unlimited Data Retention

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

Starter/Growth: 3-year retention; Business: 5-year retention

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.

Official GA4 import supported (up to 5 GA4 properties); Universal Analytics (UA) not supported

Raw Data Export

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

CSV/ZIP exports available on all plans; Stats API on Business plan; raw event-level export requires Enterprise

Platform & integrations

Has API

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

Stats API is a Business plan feature; Events API (for sending data) available on all plans

Tracking Script Size (KB)

3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.

1.2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.

Official WordPress Plugin

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

Official WordPress plugin maintained by Plausible

Email Reports

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

Weekly (every Monday) and/or monthly (1st of month) email reports; analytics embedded in email

Public Dashboard Sharing

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

Shared links (optionally password-protected) and fully public dashboards supported

The verdict

GoatCounter

Best for free, no-cost hosted pageview tracking

GoatCounter's hosted service is free with no paid plan, where Plausible's hosted tier starts at $9/mo. It keeps data indefinitely versus Plausible's 36-month retention, and exports full pageview-level data as CSV or JSON on the free service, while Plausible reserves raw event-level export for Enterprise. The trade-off: no goals, funnels, or revenue tracking.

Full profile

Plausible Analytics

Best for goal, funnel, and revenue analysis

Plausible tracks goals with conversion rates, multi-step funnels, and revenue on events (funnels and revenue on the $19/mo Business plan) — none of which GoatCounter offers; it is a pageview and event counter only. Plausible also ships a lighter 1.2 KB script versus GoatCounter's 3 KB and a 30-day trial. The cost: paid hosting from $9/mo and 36-month retention.

Full profile

Sources · 33 verified references

goatcounter.com plausible.io arp242.net github.com gc.zgo.at

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