GoatCounter review 2026: how this open-source, cookieless web analytics tool works, its free and paid hosted plans, self-hosting option, pros, cons and…
GoatCounter is an open-source, privacy-focused web analytics platform created by developer Martin Tournoij, who publishes as arp242. The hosted goatcounter.com service launched in August 2019 as a single-developer project with no outside investors, funded through hosted-service revenue and GitHub Sponsors.
It is built as a single, self-contained binary written in Go, making self-hosting unusually simple, while the hosted version offers the same software as a managed service for users who do not want to run their own server.
GoatCounter avoids cookies and persistent unique identifiers, computing unique visits through short-lived, privacy-respecting session heuristics instead, which lets most sites run it without a cookie-consent banner under GDPR. Integration options include a roughly 3.5 kilobyte JavaScript snippet, a JavaScript-free tracking pixel, backend middleware, or bulk log-file import.
The dashboard surfaces page views, unique visits, referrers, campaign and UTM tracking, browser and screen-size breakdowns, and visitor country and language, and it is deliberately built to be usable with screen readers and keyboard navigation, reflecting the creator's accessibility focus. Users can export all their data at any time and cancel without lock-in.
The hosted goatcounter.com service is free for reasonable public and non-commercial usage, covering personal websites and small-to-medium businesses. Sites with very high traffic volumes or larger commercial usage are asked to contribute through GitHub Sponsors to help cover shared hosting costs.
The self-hosted option is completely free with no usage ceiling, since it uses the same open-source codebase distributed under the European Union Public License version 1.2, which is permissive enough to allow a self-hosted deployment to be modified and even shipped as a commercial fork under the same license.
Yes, the hosted goatcounter.com service is free for reasonable public and non-commercial usage, and the self-hosted open-source version is always free with no usage ceiling.
No, GoatCounter does not use cookies or assign persistent unique identifiers to visitors, which is why most sites can run it without a cookie-consent banner under GDPR.
Yes, GoatCounter is open source and distributed as a single, self-contained Go binary, making self-hosting straightforward without needing a separate database server.
GoatCounter was created by developer Martin Tournoij, known online as arp242, with the hosted service launching in August 2019.
GoatCounter is released under the European Union Public License version 1.2, which permits self-hosting, modification and even commercial forking under the same license terms.
GoatCounter is much lighter weight, does not track personal data or use cookies, and is open source, but it offers fewer advanced segmentation and funnel-analysis features than Google Analytics.