GoatCounter - Free & Open-Source Web Analytics

When people think about web analytics, Google Analytics is the first option that comes to mind. It is one of the most widely used analytics tools on the web. It is free and has a lot of great features.

It provides information about how long a person stays on your site, behaviour of the person on your site, bounce rate and so much more. Google Analytics can even show infomration in real-time. These features all sound cool but it comes it with a cost - your privacy.

Plus, if you are running a simple blogsite like I am, do you really need all this data? Not really

All I just want to know is if people are visiting my site without sacrificing the privacy of my visitors and me.

Meet GoatCounter. It is a free, open-source, privacy respecting and self-hostable tool that I use on my site. It doesn’t use cookies or store your ip-address.

Martin Tournoij, the person behind GoatCounter specifically created it to track basic analytics on his personal website.

GoatCounter can collect data on referer header, screen size and country. You are in full control, so if you don’t want to record a specific information, you can turn it off. You can even decide on how long the collected data should be retained.

The user interface is simple, clean and displays all the information in a single page. But I do think the dashboard could look a little bit more modern and attractive.

Conclusion

I’ve been using GoatCounter for several months and I am really happy with it.

There are many other alternative open source analytics tool but you usually have to pay or self-host the software. Plus, most of these other options are designed for businesses and marketplaces.

For getting a basic idea on traffic on your personal website, GoatCounter is a great option.

This is day 28 of #100DaystoOffload