Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. Seline
GoatCounter and Seline 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.
Seline
Simple, cookieless, privacy-first website and product analytics built in the EU.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
Warsaw, Poland Registered address: ul. Łowicka 60/16, 02-531 Warsaw, Poland.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
4 Tiny bootstrapped team of approximately 4 people. Co-founded by Kostya Nesterovich and Misha Slizenko.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
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$14 Single 'Pro' plan at $14/month (monthly billing). Annual billing available with 2 months free.
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.
No perpetual free plan. Seline states: 'No, we don't have a free plan. We're a small bootstrapped team operating exclusively through subscriber fees.'
Free Trial Length (Days)
0 days No paid plan exists, so no trial applies. The hosted service is entirely free.
7 days 7-day free trial on the Pro plan, no credit card required.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
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100k Pro plan includes 100,000 events per month. Seline meters 'events' (pageviews + custom events combined), not pageviews alone.
Entry Plan Website Limit
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1 sites Pricing is per project (one website/domain per subscription); linking additional projects requires their own Pro subscription, with the option to share an event limit.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
Live globe view and real-time visitor activity dashboard included.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
Custom events tracked via seline.track() JS method or data-sln-event HTML attributes. Custom properties supported.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Conversion via multi-step funnels (step drop-off / conversion rate) and revenue-attributed custom events.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
Multi-step funnel analysis built into the product for all plan users.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
Revenue attribution by traffic source, referrer, and UTM. Native integrations with Stripe, Shopify, and Polar. MRR tracking included.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
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Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
Cookie-free by design. Uses daily-rotated non-reversible hashing of IP+browser+device — no cookies or persistent browser storage.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
No cookie/consent banner needed. Seline explicitly states GDPR compliance without requiring visitor consent banners.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
Vendor explicitly claims GDPR compliance. No personal data retained; EU-hosted infrastructure.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
All infrastructure hosted in Germany (EU) via Hetzner — app servers, ClickHouse, and Postgres databases.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
The main SaaS product is proprietary. Only the JavaScript tracker client (seline-js) is MIT-licensed open source on GitHub.
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
proprietary Main analytics platform is proprietary SaaS. The JS tracker client is separately MIT-licensed.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
Cloud-only SaaS. No self-hosting or on-premises option is documented or advertised.
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
Pro plan retains data forever ('unlimited' retention). Free trial and any hypothetical lower tiers cap at 1 year.
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.
No official Google Analytics (UA/GA4) historical-data import; tracking starts from install.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
Public API includes a Raw Events endpoint for exporting individual event records with full filtering, pagination, and ordering. CSV export also available via AI assistant.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
Public Stats API available at seline.com/api — covers visit metrics, custom events, funnels, visitor profiles, revenue data, and raw events.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
4.2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
Official WordPress plugin published at wordpress.org/plugins/seline-analytics by the Seline founder (nstkostya = Kostya Nesterovich).
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
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Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
Dashboards can be shared via a public link (e.g. app.seline.com/share/<site>) viewable without an account.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for free, open-source, self-hosted tracking
GoatCounter's hosted service is free with no paid plan, against Seline's $14/month and 7-day trial. It is open source under EUPL-1.2 and self-hostable, where Seline is proprietary and cloud-only. It also imports Google Analytics history and ships a 3 KB script. The trade-off: no goal, funnel, or revenue tracking.
Full profile Seline Best for funnels and revenue attribution
Seline adds the conversion features GoatCounter lacks: goal tracking, multi-step funnels, and ecommerce revenue attribution with native Stripe, Shopify, and Polar integrations plus MRR. Its Pro plan ($14/month, 100k events, one site) carries these, where GoatCounter is a minimalist counter with no funnels or revenue tracking. It is proprietary and cloud-only, with no GA import.
Full profileSources · 29 verified references
goatcounter.com seline.com arp242.net starterstory.com capterra.com github.com + 4 more
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