Compare·GoatCounter
Free to run, and it only counts pages.
GoatCounter is open source, and its hosted service is free for reasonable use. It counts visits to pages without tracking people, so funnels and retention are out of scope.
What GoatCounter is
An open-source web analytics tool that you can self-host, or use for free on goatcounter.com.
- Licence
- Open source (EUPL-1.2, slightly modified)
- Hosting
- Free service in Finland and Germany, or self-host
- Best at
- Giving a personal site or a small business simple visit counts for free, with nothing stored in the browser.
Where GoatCounter wins.
If one of these is a must-have for you, go with them.
Free, hosted or not
The hosted service is free for personal sites and small businesses, and donations pay for the servers. You can also run the code yourself without restrictions. We are hosted only and closed source.
Easy to run yourself
Self-hosted GoatCounter is one program and a SQLite file. You only need a database server if you choose PostgreSQL for a larger site.
It works without JavaScript
GoatCounter can count with a small tracking pixel instead of a script, so it still works where JavaScript is off. Our page views come from a script in the page.
Very little is kept
By default it stores counts, not a row for each page view. IP addresses and browser strings are never written to disk. If your aim is to hold as little as possible, it does that well.
Where Spreelytics wins.
Every line here is a page in the product today.
Questions about people
GoatCounter forgets a visitor after eight hours, on purpose. In our default mode a visitor keeps one identity, so retention and one person’s timeline both work.
Funnels and journeys
Our funnels show the drop-off between up to eight steps. Journeys show the routes people take, and you can walk back from any page to see how people reached it. GoatCounter has neither.
Revenue by channel
Connect Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy, and each sale is credited to the visits that led to it. Last-touch credits the final visit, and linear shares the sale across every visit in a window you set. Both work on every plan, including Free.
All five UTM fields
GoatCounter reads the campaign name and the source. We keep all five UTM fields, so you can also split a campaign by medium or by content.
Side by side.
We leave prices out because GoatCounter can change theirs at any time. Ours are on the pricing page.
| Feature | Spreelytics |  GoatCounter |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100k events / month, 13 months of data | Free for reasonable use |
| Data sampling | Never sampled | Never sampled |
| Cookies | One first-party cookie, or cookieless | None |
| Open source | Not included | Included |
| Self-hosting | Not included | Included |
| Funnels | Included | Not included |
| Retention and cohorts | Included | Not included |
| Path analysis / journeys | Included | Not included |
| Person-level timelines | Included | Not included |
| Revenue attribution you control | Last-touch or linear | Not included |
| AI crawler and bot traffic | Included | Not included |
| MCP access for AI agents | Included | Community MCP only |
| Session replay | On Growth | Not included |
| Feature flags and experiments | Not included | Not included |
Moving over.
Every one of these starts by leaving GoatCounter running.
01
Keep GoatCounter counting
It costs nothing to leave on. Add our snippet beside it and compare two full weeks.
02
Send your click events
A GoatCounter event is a named click. Send the same moments as custom events here, one call each, then name the ones that matter as goals.
03
Tag your campaign links fully
Add utm_medium and utm_content to the links you already tag. GoatCounter does not read them, and here each one becomes its own breakdown.
04
Connect your payments
Connect your payment provider in Settings and pass the visitor id at checkout. Each sale then shows up beside the channel that brought the buyer.
FAQ
Switching from GoatCounter.
What people ask before they switch.
GoatCounter is free. Why pay for anything?
You may not need to. Our Free plan covers 100k events a month across unlimited projects. If page counts answer your questions, GoatCounter is a good choice.
The case for us starts when you need to know who came back, or which channel brought in the money.
Can I self-host Spreelytics like GoatCounter?
No. We are hosted only. If running it yourself is the point, GoatCounter is one of the easiest tools to self-host.
Does Spreelytics need a cookie?
By default we set one first-party cookie, so a returning visitor keeps one identity. That is what makes retention and person timelines possible.
You can switch any project to cookieless, and then nothing is stored in the browser. An anonymous visitor then counts as new each day. GoatCounter goes further and forgets a visitor after eight hours.
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Free up to 100k events a month · no credit card