Compare·Vercel Web Analytics
Easy to switch on, but it stops at counting.
Vercel Web Analytics is the quickest start if your site already runs on Vercel, and it sets no cookies. It forgets each visitor after a day, and campaign tags need a paid add-on.
What Vercel Web Analytics is
Privacy-friendly page view analytics built into Vercel, the hosting platform, for projects deployed there.
- Licence
- Proprietary (open-source package)
- Hosting
- Vercel only, for sites on Vercel
- Best at
- Switching on in a click for a site already on Vercel, with page views grouped by your framework’s routes.
Where Vercel Web Analytics wins.
If one of these is a must-have for you, go with them.
Already part of your deploys
If your site is on Vercel, you switch it on in the dashboard and add one package. The numbers sit beside your deployments. We are one more account and one more script.
Routes, not only paths
Vercel can group page views by your framework’s route, so /blog/[slug] is one row for every post. We store each path, so every post gets its own row.
Flags beside the numbers
Vercel Flags and Web Analytics share a dashboard, so you can split page views by a flag’s value. We have no feature flags or experiments.
AI traffic with nothing to install
Vercel’s Observability has an AI Traffic tab. It separates crawlers from assistants that fetch a page for someone. Our crawler counts need a small middleware in your app.
Where Spreelytics wins.
Every line here is a page in the product today.
Campaigns and events on Free
Vercel’s Hobby plan has no custom events. UTM tags need the Web Analytics Plus add-on or Enterprise. Our Free plan has custom events and all five UTM fields.
Longer history
Vercel shows one month of history on Hobby, and up to 24 months on paid plans. Ours keeps 13 months on Free and five years on Growth.
People across visits
Vercel’s visitor hash resets every day, so it cannot follow anyone from one day to the next. We give each person one timeline, and funnels follow the person across visits.
Revenue by channel
Vercel can count a purchase as a custom event, but it does not trace the money to a channel. We take payments from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy and credit each sale by last-touch or linear attribution.
Side by side.
We leave prices out because Vercel Web Analytics can change theirs at any time. Ours are on the pricing page.
| Feature | Spreelytics |  Vercel Web Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100k events / month, 13 months of data | 50k events, 1 month of history |
| Data sampling | Never sampled | Not documented |
| Cookies | One first-party cookie, or cookieless | None, a daily visitor hash |
| Open source | Not included | Package only (MIT) |
| Self-hosting | Not included | Not 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 | AI Traffic tab, in Observability |
| MCP access for AI agents | Included | Official, read-only |
| Session replay | On Growth | Not included |
| Feature flags and experiments | Not included | Included |
Moving over.
Every one of these starts by leaving Vercel Web Analytics running.
01
Keep the Analytics component
Leave @vercel/analytics in your layout while ours collects. Both can run at once.
02
Add the snippet to your root layout
One script tag in the head of your root layout. Client-side route changes are picked up on their own, so every screen is a pageview.
03
Count crawlers in your middleware
On Next.js, add our crawler middleware to your middleware file. Other frameworks can wrap any fetch handler. It never delays a response.
04
Connect your payments
Connect your payment provider and pass the visitor id in the checkout metadata. Each sale is then traced to the visit that led to it.
FAQ
Switching from Vercel Web Analytics.
What people ask before they switch.
Is Spreelytics cookieless like Vercel Web Analytics?
By default it is not. Vercel identifies visitors with a hash that resets every day, so it cannot recognise anyone the next day. We set one first-party cookie by default, so a returning visitor is recognised. That is what makes retention and person timelines work.
You can switch a project to cookieless mode, which stores nothing in the browser. An anonymous visitor then counts as new each day, much as on Vercel.
Does it work with Next.js?
Yes. The snippet goes in your root layout, and client-side route changes count as pageviews with nothing to add. The crawler middleware has a Next.js version too.
What if we move off Vercel later?
Nothing changes on our side. The snippet is one script tag in your page head, so it moves with your site. Vercel Web Analytics needs a project deployed on Vercel.
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Free up to 100k events a month · no credit card