Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. Statcounter
GoatCounter and Statcounter 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.
Statcounter
Simple real-time web analytics tracking visitor behaviour, traffic sources, and page performance.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
Dublin, Ireland Headquartered at Guinness Enterprise Centre, Taylor's Lane, Dublin 8, Ireland.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
8 Very small team; multiple sources indicate 7–10 employees as of 2024–2025.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
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$9 Premium plan starts at $9/month for 20,000 sessions/month.
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.
Basic plan is free forever with 5,000 sessions/month and 14 days data retention.
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 paid plans, no credit card required.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
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20k Entry Premium plan includes 20,000 sessions/month. Statcounter uses 'sessions' not pageviews.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
Live visitor feed and real-time visitor updates available on all plans including free Basic.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
Statcounter does not support user-defined custom events. Goal tracking is URL/page-based only.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Supports URL-based conversion goal tracking; shows conversion rate from landing page to goal URL.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
No multi-step funnel analysis feature found in Statcounter's product.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
No ecommerce or revenue tracking feature found; no monetary value attribution in any report.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
Interactive click heatmaps available on Premium Plus plan ($19/mo and above).
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
Statcounter sets a persistent analytics cookie ('is_unique') by default. No cookieless tracking mode available.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
Statcounter sets persistent analytics cookies; a consent banner is required for EU/ePrivacy compliance.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
Statcounter claims GDPR compatibility, arguing it is anonymous tracking and IP addresses are not personal data under its use.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
No first-party EU data-storage guarantee; company is Dublin-based but visitor data location is undocumented and infrastructure signals point to US providers (Cloudflare/Rackspace).
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
Statcounter is a proprietary closed-source SaaS product.
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
proprietary Closed-source SaaS with a proprietary license.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
Cloud-only SaaS; no self-hosting or on-premises option available.
Data Retention (Months)
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36 mo Entry Premium plan retains data for 3 years (36 months).
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
Entry Premium plan has a 3-year (36-month) data retention limit; Premium Plus is 5 years.
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 Google Analytics historical data import tool found.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
Only aggregated summary reports are exportable as CSV/Excel; raw visit-level data export is not available.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
Statcounter API at api.statcounter.com allows programmatic access to analytics data; requires paid plan.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
17.2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
Official Statcounter plugin published on wordpress.org under the vendor's name.
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
Scheduled email reports available daily, weekly, or monthly with customizable stat selection.
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
Stats can be made publicly viewable via a 'Public Stats' option; no login required to view.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for cookieless, open-source, fully free tracking
GoatCounter tracks without cookies, so no consent banner is needed, where Statcounter sets a persistent cookie and requires one. It is open source (EUPL-1.2) and self-hostable, hosts data in the EU, exports raw pageview-level data as CSV/JSON, and keeps it indefinitely. The hosted service is entirely free with custom events and a 3 KB script.
Full profile Statcounter Best for goal/conversion tracking and heatmaps
Statcounter adds URL-based goal/conversion tracking and click heatmaps (Premium Plus, $19/mo), neither of which GoatCounter offers. Paid plans start at $9/mo for 20,000 sessions with a 30-day trial, versus GoatCounter's free-only model. The trade-offs: it sets cookies (consent banner required), is closed-source and cloud-only, and offers no raw data export.
Full profileSources · 31 verified references
goatcounter.com statcounter.com arp242.net tracxn.com github.com api.statcounter.com + 2 more
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