Best alternatives to GoatCounter in 2026

Most websites want to know roughly how many people visit and where they come from, without needing to build a profile of each individual visitor. GoatCounter is a small, free analytics tool built exactly for that: enough numbers to understand your traffic, with nothing that identifies a person. GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform that tracks visitor metrics — page views, referrers, browser, rough location, screen size, campaign sources — without collecting personally identifiable information, using non-identifiable session hashing instead of persistent cookies or unique IDs. Because it doesn't track individuals, most jurisdictions don't require a cookie-consent banner for it. It can be embedded via a lightweight JavaScript tag (about 3.5KB), an image pixel, backend middleware, or by parsing existing log files, making it usable even on sites that block third-party scripts. The dashboard offers a text-based view and path filtering rather than a heavy visual UI. It's free for reasonable use on personal sites and small-to-medium businesses via the hosted service, fully exportable, and open source (Go, ~5,800 GitHub stars) for anyone who wants to self-host for heavier traffic.