Web Analytics · Comparison
GoatCounter vs. Umami
GoatCounter and Umami 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.
Umami
Open-source, privacy-focused web analytics available self-hosted or as a managed cloud service.
Company facts
Headquarters
Dublin, Ireland GoatCounter is a one-person project by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland.
San Francisco, CA Umami Software, Inc. is incorporated and headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Employees
1 GoatCounter is a one-person independent project built and maintained solely by Martin Tournoij.
6 Small team; PitchBook reports 6 employees; LinkedIn shows 2-10 range.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
—
$20 Umami Cloud Pro plan at $20/month (1M events, 2-year retention). Entry paid tier.
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.
Free Hobby cloud plan (100k events/mo, 1 site, 6-month retention) plus free MIT open-source self-hosted edition.
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 (Pro and above).
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
—
1M Pro plan includes 1 million events/month. Umami meters all pageviews and custom events as 'events'.
Entry Plan Website Limit
—
20 sites Up to 20 websites on the Pro plan ($20/mo), the entry paid Umami Cloud tier.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard uses WebSocket for real-time data updates.
Real-time view shows new visits and events the moment they happen, with no batch-processing delay.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via data-goatcounter-click HTML attribute or window.goatcounter.count() JS call.
Custom events tracked via umami.track() JS call or data-umami-event HTML attributes.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
No goal or conversion-rate tracking; GoatCounter is a minimalist pageview/event counter.
Goals feature tracks pageviews or events and reports conversion rate against total visitors in a date range.
Funnels
No multi-step funnel analysis.
Multi-step funnel analysis shows per-step user counts and step-to-step drop-off; supports URL, event, and wildcard steps.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
No ecommerce or revenue tracking; no monetary value can be attached to events.
Revenue tracking attaches monetary values (amount + currency) to events and reports ROI by page/source.
Heatmaps
GoatCounter does not offer heatmap or session replay features.
Click and scroll heatmaps available since v3.1.0; must be enabled per-site in settings.
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
No cookies, localStorage, or any browser-side persistent identifiers are used.
Umami does not use any cookies in the tracking code by design.
Consent Banner Required
GoatCounter's docs state a GDPR consent banner is probably not required, as no PII is collected.
Umami states no cookie consent banner is required because no cookies or personal data are collected.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor provides GDPR guidance and states no consent notice is likely needed due to no PII collection.
Vendor explicitly claims GDPR and CCPA compliance via cookieless, no-PII architecture.
EU Data Residency
Data hosted on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany. Operated by Martin Tournoij from Ireland.
Umami Cloud offers EU server option; Cloud FAQ states servers are in both US and EU.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GoatCounter is open source under EUPL-1.2, available at github.com/arp242/goatcounter.
Umami is fully open source under the MIT license with source on GitHub (37k+ stars).
License
EUPL-1.2 Licensed under EUPL-1.2 with a minor modification to the Compatible Licenses appendix.
MIT Umami is released under the MIT license.
Self-Hostable
Self-hosting is officially documented and encouraged for high-volume usage.
Official self-hosting supported via Docker or Node.js with PostgreSQL; extensive documentation provided.
Data Retention (Months)
—
24 mo Pro plan ($20/mo) retains data for 2 years (24 months).
Unlimited Data Retention
Hosted data is retained until the user deletes it; no time-based aging-out.
Pro plan retains data for 2 years; self-hosted deployments have unlimited retention controlled by the operator.
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 import tool exists; community workarounds only.
Raw Data Export
Full pageview-level data exportable as CSV or JSON. API also supports paginated data export.
Cloud export to CSV (gzip) via UI; full API for JSON data retrieval; self-hosted users own the Postgres DB directly.
Platform & integrations
Has API
REST API (v0) for stats retrieval, data ingestion, site management, and export.
Full documented REST API for retrieving analytics data; available on both cloud and self-hosted.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
2.3 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official WordPress plugin maintained by GoatCounter's creator (arp242/goatcounter-wordpress on GitHub).
No official Umami-published WordPress plugin; only third-party community plugins exist.
Email Reports
Scheduled email reports are supported. Enhancement work completed Dec 2025.
Scheduled email reports (top pages + referrers summary) available on Pro and higher cloud plans.
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared via secret access token URL (e.g. https://mystats.example.com?access-token=…).
Share URL generates a public, password-free read-only link to selected dashboard sections.
The verdict
GoatCounter Best for a free, minimalist pageview counter
GoatCounter's hosted service is entirely free with no paid tier, versus Umami Cloud's $20/mo Pro plan, and keeps data until you delete it rather than aging it out. It also offers a Google Analytics import and an official WordPress plugin, both of which Umami lacks. The tradeoff: no goals, funnels, heatmaps, or revenue tracking.
Full profile Umami Best for goals, funnels, and revenue analysis
Umami adds goal/conversion tracking, multi-step funnels, click and scroll heatmaps, and revenue tracking that attaches monetary values to events. GoatCounter offers none of these. Its $20/mo Pro plan covers 1M events across 20 sites; a free Hobby tier exists for lighter use. Backed by a 6-person company versus GoatCounter's solo maintainer.
Full profileSources · 33 verified references
goatcounter.com linkedin.com arp242.net umami.is docs.umami.is github.com + 3 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.