No. 10 of 30 ยท Open source and self-hosted
GoatCounter
Deliberately tiny, deliberately free, and honest about being neither polished nor ambitious.
It offers a no-JavaScript tracking pixel and server log file parsing, so it can count visits without running code in the browser at all.
The verdict
GoatCounter is a small, single-developer analytics tool that is free for personal and non-commercial use and open source for everyone else, and its virtue is that it knows exactly how small it is. Visits, referrers, pages, browsers, screen sizes, locations. No cookies, no tracking across sites, no attempt to be a platform.
The feature worth knowing about, and the reason it earns a place above several better-funded tools on the data measure, is that it does not require JavaScript at all. There is a tracking pixel for environments where scripts are unwelcome, and documented support for parsing server log files, so you can produce analytics for a site that ships no client-side code whatsoever. Nothing else on this list takes that seriously.
What you actually get
The depth score of 3 is the honest one. There are no funnels, no meaningful segmentation, no heatmaps, no replay, and the interface is functional rather than designed. If you want to understand a conversion path this is the wrong tool and it does not pretend otherwise.
What it is is a completely honest answer to the question of how many people read the blog, at a cost of nothing, from a project with no growth incentive to complicate itself. The conduct score of 8 reflects a licence and pricing posture that has stayed stable and generous for six years, which on this list is rarer than it should be. The risk is the mirror image: it is one person's project, and the continuity question that raises is real and should be weighed before a business depends on it.
Best for
Personal sites, blogs, documentation sites and open-source projects that want honest visit counts for nothing, especially where running JavaScript is undesirable.
Getting it running
A small script tag, or a tracking pixel, or point it at your server logs. Self-hosting is a single Go binary, which is the easiest deployment on this list.
What to watch out for
Very limited depth: no funnels, no real segmentation, no behaviour tooling. The interface is plain. It is maintained by one person, so continuity is a genuine risk for anything commercial. The free hosted tier is for non-commercial use, so business sites should pay or self-host.
Pricing and practicalities
Free hosted for personal and non-commercial sites, with paid plans and donations for commercial use. Self-hosting is a single binary under an open licence. Tracking pixel and server log parsing are documented alternatives to the script. Read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Any site that needs to understand behaviour rather than count it, where Microsoft Clarity is also free and answers a completely different question. Also not for commercial sites wanting support and a roadmap, where Umami or Plausible Analytics are safer bets.
How it compares
Against Umami it is smaller, simpler and easier to self-host, with meaningfully less to show for it. Against Absolutely Analytics the gap is everything except price, and the question is whether nine dollars buys enough to matter, which for a personal blog it may not.
The ten measures
Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.
What this rests on
GoatCounter's own documentation, read 2026-09-11, including its pages on the tracking pixel, server log file parsing, the JavaScript API and its pricing and licensing terms.
Desk research against the project's published documentation and public source. This is a thin entry by design rather than by omission: the project publishes little marketing material because there is little product to market.
This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.