Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. Simple Analytics
GoatCounter and Simple 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.
Simple Analytics
Privacy-friendly, cookieless web analytics that requires no consent banner.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
Amsterdam, Netherlands Dutch company (Simple Analytics B.V.); founders and operations based in Amsterdam.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
3 Very small team — founder Adriaan van Rossum plus a couple of team members as of 2024/2025.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
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$20 Self-Serve plan at $20/month (monthly billing); entry slider point is 100k pageviews. 2 months free with annual billing.
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.
Perpetually free plan available; analytics history limited to 30 days on the free tier.
Free Trial Length (Days)
0 days No paid plan exists, so no trial applies. The hosted service is entirely free.
14 days 14-day free trial on paid plans; no credit card required.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
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100k Self-Serve plan starts at 100,000 pageviews/month (adjustable up to 2.5M via slider).
Entry Plan Website Limit
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10 sites Starter plan covers up to 10 websites.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
Live visitor stats; embeddable live-stats widget for your own site.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
Custom events supported via sa_event() JS call, data attributes, and server-side API.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Goals feature reports conversion rates for defined events or pageview paths.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
Multi-step funnels supported via Goals; can chain events and pageviews with step-by-step drop-off.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
Revenue values can be attached to events via metadata (e.g. revenue, order value) and reported in Goals.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
No heatmap feature — Simple Analytics is a minimalist analytics tool focused on traffic stats.
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
Tracking is cookieless by design — no cookies or persistent identifiers are set.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
Vendor explicitly states no cookie or consent banner is required when using Simple Analytics.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
Vendor states it fully adheres to GDPR and UK GDPR by not collecting personal data.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
Data stored in the Netherlands on Dutch-hosted servers (Worldstream, Leaseweb); never leaves the EU.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
Core SaaS product is proprietary; only the public tracking scripts are MIT-licensed open source.
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
proprietary Core analytics platform is proprietary SaaS; tracking scripts are MIT-licensed.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
Cloud-only SaaS product; no documented self-hosting or on-premises option.
Data Retention (Months)
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36 mo Simple plan: 3 years
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
No
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 Google Analytics 4 (GA4) import tool; heavily filtered for privacy.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
Export API provides raw event-level data export; CSV export and data warehouse integrations also available.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
Stats API, Export API, and Admin API all documented.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
3.8 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
Official WordPress plugin at wordpress.org/plugins/simpleanalytics/ maintained by Simple Analytics.
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
Built-in weekly and monthly email reports; sent at 9AM in local timezone with top referrers summary.
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
Dashboards can be made fully public or shared via link; Simple Analytics publishes their own publicly.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for free, self-hosted, open-source analytics
GoatCounter is free with no paid tier, open source under EUPL-1.2, and officially self-hostable, while Simple Analytics is proprietary, cloud-only, and starts at $20/month. It also keeps data with no time-based aging and ships a 3 KB script. The trade-off: no goals, funnels, or revenue tracking.
Full profile Simple Analytics Best for conversion, funnel, and revenue tracking
Simple Analytics adds goal/conversion tracking, multi-step funnels, and ecommerce revenue values on events — all of which GoatCounter lacks. Its $20/month Self-Serve plan covers up to 10 sites with a 14-day trial. The cost: it is proprietary cloud-only SaaS, not self-hostable, and retention caps at 36 months.
Full profileSources · 33 verified references
goatcounter.com datarequests.org arp242.net simpleanalytics.com github.com docs.simpleanalytics.com + 4 more
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