Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. PostHog
GoatCounter and PostHog 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.
PostHog
All-in-one open-source platform for product analytics, web analytics, session replay, and feature flags.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
San Francisco, CA PostHog is incorporated in San Francisco, CA but is a remote-first company with team across 20+ countries.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
202 Approximately 202 employees as of May 2026 per Tracxn; ~185 per April 2026 LinkedIn data.
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.
PostHog offers a perpetual free tier: 1M events/month at no cost, no credit card required, no expiry.
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 period — PostHog provides a perpetual free tier instead of a time-limited trial.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
—
1M Free tier includes 1M events/month. PostHog meters 'events' (not raw pageviews); each pageview fires as one event.
Entry Plan Website Limit
—
6 sites 6 projects on the paid (pay-as-you-go) plan; PostHog tracks per project. Free plan includes 1 project.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
PostHog's web analytics dashboard includes real-time data with live visitor activity.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
PostHog supports custom event tracking via JS SDK (posthog.capture()), autocapture, and data attributes.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Web analytics dashboard supports conversion goals: define a key event or action, see total/unique conversions and conversion rate.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
PostHog supports multi-step funnels with step-to-step drop-off analysis, breakdowns, and timings.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
PostHog supports revenue tracking: capture monetary values on events, Stripe integration, currency conversion, MRR/ARPU dashboards.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
PostHog includes click heatmaps, scroll maps, and rage-click detection as part of the platform (toolbar overlay).
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
PostHog supports cookieless tracking mode (cookieless_mode: always) where no persistent ID is stored in the browser.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
Default PostHog configuration uses cookies/localStorage and requires a consent banner. Cookieless mode removes the requirement but is not the default.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
PostHog explicitly claims GDPR compliance with EU Cloud hosting, DPA, cookieless option, and data anonymization.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
PostHog Cloud EU stores all data in AWS eu-central-1 (Frankfurt, Germany). Available at no extra cost.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
PostHog is open source under MIT license (with a proprietary EE directory). A fully FOSS mirror (posthog-foss) is also published.
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
MIT Core product is MIT-licensed; /ee directory with enterprise features uses a separate proprietary license.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
PostHog supports self-hosting via Docker Compose with documented install guides. Free for self-hosters.
Data Retention (Months)
—
84 mo Paid plans retain event data for 7 years (84 months); after 1 year data may move to cold storage (slower queries).
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
Data retention is 7 years (84 months) on paid plans — finite, not unlimited.
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.
PostHog documents a GA-to-PostHog migration path via BigQuery export + Python SDK import, with official step-by-step docs.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
PostHog supports raw event-level data export via Exports API, batch exports to S3/Postgres, and real-time pipeline destinations.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
PostHog provides a comprehensive REST API for querying analytics data, dashboards, exports, and more.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
66.7 KB Initial array.js payload; PostHog lazy-loads additional modules.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
No official PostHog-published WordPress plugin. PostHog docs describe manual snippet insertion; multiple third-party community plugins exist.
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
PostHog supports scheduled email subscriptions for dashboards and insights (weekly, monthly, or custom schedule).
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
PostHog supports fully public dashboard sharing via a shareable link, no account required to view. Embeddable via iframe.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for lightweight, consent-free pageview counting
GoatCounter is the leaner pick: a 3 KB script versus PostHog's 66.7 KB, no consent banner required by default (PostHog needs one unless you switch to cookieless mode), unlimited data retention against PostHog's 84-month cap, and an official WordPress plugin PostHog lacks. The trade-off is scope: no funnels, goals, heatmaps, or revenue tracking.
Full profile PostHog Best for product analytics beyond pageviews
PostHog wins when you need depth GoatCounter doesn't offer: multi-step funnels, goal and conversion tracking, heatmaps, and ecommerce/revenue tracking are all present here and absent in GoatCounter. Its free tier covers 1M events/month. Costs are a 66.7 KB script, a consent banner by default, and 84-month retention rather than GoatCounter's unlimited.
Full profileSources · 35 verified references
goatcounter.com posthog.com arp242.net tracxn.com github.com gc.zgo.at + 1 more
Affiliate disclosure. DecisionWire may earn a commission when you sign up through links on this page. Commissions never influence our data, scores, or rankings.