Free alternatives to Counter.dev
Counter.dev goes further on privacy than almost anything, no cookies, no IP logging, no fingerprinting, and it costs whatever you want to pay. The reasons people move on are reliability and reach. It is a hobby-scale project by the author's own figures (€350 in donations across 26 payments in 2022), it has no events, funnels, or conversion tracking, and it publishes no data retention policy (as of July 2026). If you need something you can build on, or a few more features, without giving up the privacy, these are the alternatives to weigh.
Facts checked as of July 2026Read our Counter.dev review
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Umami
Best Free Alternative ToCounter.devCounter.dev's cookieless privacy with a company behind it, a dependable free hosted plan, and events and funnels
Umami keeps what brought you to Counter.dev, a cookieless, privacy-first dashboard, and fixes its main weakness, which is that it is a thinly funded solo project. You get a single page of visitors, referrers, pages, and countries, plus custom events and funnels Counter.dev does not have. Both routes are free (as of July 2026): the Cloud Hobby plan is permanently free, and the MIT-licensed app self-hosts on your own Postgres server. It is run by a small company rather than one person, so it is easier to build on.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT)
United States- Best for:
- Counter.dev users who need something dependable without giving up privacy
- The catch:
- Umami does not publish its Cloud event allowance anywhere machine-readable, so confirm the current Hobby limit before you point a busy site at it.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Backed by a small company rather than a one-person, donation-funded project
- Advantage: Also cookieless, so no consent banner
- Advantage: Adds custom events and funnels Counter.dev does not have
- Advantage: Permanent free hosted plan plus a free MIT self-host
- Tradeoff: Counter.dev goes further on privacy by logging no IP addresses at all
- Tradeoff: Self-hosts on Node and Postgres, heavier than Counter.dev's setup
An established privacy company with a polished dashboard, free if you self-host
Plausible is the privacy-analytics tool with the track record Counter.dev does not have yet, running as a funded company since 2018. Same cookieless approach, a sub-1 KB script, and a more refined single-page dashboard, plus goals and campaign tracking. The catch is money: Plausible Cloud has no free plan, only a 30-day trial and then $9 per month billed annually (as of July 2026), so free means self-hosting the AGPL Community Edition. If Counter.dev's hobby-scale funding was the worry, this is the dependable version.
- From $9/month (as of July 2026)
- Estonia
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Estonia- Best for:
- Counter.dev users who want an established, supported privacy tool
- The catch:
- Plausible Cloud has no free tier, and self-hosting the free edition needs both PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: An established, funded company since 2018, not a hobby project
- Advantage: Also cookieless, so no consent banner
- Advantage: More polished dashboard, plus goals and campaign tracking
- Tradeoff: No free hosted plan, where Counter.dev is free on pay-what-you-want
- Tradeoff: Self-hosting needs Postgres and ClickHouse
- Tradeoff: Counter.dev's no-IP-logging stance is stricter than Plausible's
The closest minimalist peer, cookieless and free both ways, with a single-binary self-host
GoatCounter is Counter.dev's nearest neighbour in size and spirit: pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, and screen sizes, cookieless, and nothing heavier. The hosted service is free for what the author calls reasonable public usage, and the self-hosted version is a single Go binary on SQLite, so it is trivially easy to run yourself. It shares Counter.dev's one real drawback, being a solo project, so it is a sideways move on reliability rather than an upgrade.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- Netherlands
- Open source (EUPL-1.2 (modified))
Netherlands- Best for:
- Counter.dev users who want to stay this minimal and self-host simply
- The catch:
- The free hosted terms are only reasonable public usage with no published number and a currently dead pricing page, and it is a one-person project.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Also cookieless and free, with a simple single-binary self-host on SQLite
- Worth knowing: A published, working hosted service, though the limits are vague
- Worth knowing: Comparable minimal feature set, with no events or funnels either
- Tradeoff: Counter.dev logs no IP addresses, a slightly stronger privacy stance
- Tradeoff: Also a solo project, so no more dependable than Counter.dev
- Tradeoff: Free hosted limits are undefined and the pricing page is a dead link
A generous free hosted tier with the events, funnels, and replay Counter.dev never had
If you left Counter.dev because a visitor count was not enough, PostHog is the big jump: event analytics, funnels, retention, session replay, and feature flags, with a free tier of 1 million events, 5,000 web session replays, and 1 million feature flag requests a month, no card required (as of July 2026). It is far more tool than Counter.dev, and far more reliable as a company, at the cost of weight and cookies.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT (with a proprietary ee/ directory))
- Best for:
- Counter.dev users who actually needed product analytics, not just a counter
- The catch:
- It is a heavy suite with a real learning curve, it uses cookies, and one noisy autocapture setting can spend a million events in a week.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Full event analytics, funnels, replay, and feature flags Counter.dev lacks
- Advantage: A funded company with a generous, published free tier
- Advantage: SQL access to your own event data
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, so it drops Counter.dev's cookieless, no-IP privacy
- Tradeoff: Far heavier and harder to learn than Counter.dev
- Tradeoff: Events can overspend into a bill past the free tier
Full, ownable analytics depth, free if you self-host, for Counter.dev users who outgrew a counter
Matomo is the answer when you want real depth on infrastructure you own. Goals, funnels, ecommerce revenue, visitor logs, session recordings, and heatmaps, in a self-hosted On-Premise edition that is GPL-3.0 and free with unlimited hits and unlimited users. It keeps data ownership, which fits Counter.dev's ethos, but it is far more to run and far more tool than Counter.dev ever was.
- From €29/month (as of July 2026)
- New Zealand
- Open source (GPL-3.0)
New Zealand- Best for:
- Counter.dev users who need depth and will run their own server
- The catch:
- Free means administering a PHP and MySQL server, Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at €29 per month, and it meters hits, not pageviews.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Goals, funnels, ecommerce, visitor logs, and heatmaps Counter.dev has none of
- Advantage: Self-hosted is free and unlimited, keeping the data ownership Counter.dev values
- Advantage: A long-established project since 2007, not hobby-scale
- Tradeoff: Far heavier to run than Counter.dev's hosted or self-host setup
- Tradeoff: Cloud has no free tier, where Counter.dev is free
- Tradeoff: Meters hits, so events and downloads count too, not just pageviews
Free forever session replay and heatmaps, though it reverses Counter.dev's privacy stance
Clarity does the one thing Counter.dev never tried, showing you what visitors actually did: session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, and rage-click flags, free forever with no traffic limit (as of July 2026). Be clear that it is the privacy opposite of Counter.dev, since it uses cookies and sends behaviour to Microsoft, so it only makes sense if your priorities shifted from privacy to understanding behaviour. Most people run it next to a traffic tool.
- Completely free (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Former Counter.dev users who now care more about behaviour than strict privacy
- The catch:
- It uses cookies, recordings last only 30 days, and Microsoft receives your visitors' behavioral data, everything Counter.dev was built to avoid.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Session recordings and heatmaps, which Counter.dev does not do
- Advantage: Free forever with no traffic limit and a clearly free status
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies, undoing Counter.dev's cookieless setup
- Tradeoff: Sends behavioral data to Microsoft, against Counter.dev's no-IP privacy
- Tradeoff: Thirty-day recording retention, and no traffic reporting like Counter.dev's
- Tradeoff: No pay-what-you-want ownership; you pay in data instead
Free hosted at any volume with the deepest reporting, at the total opposite of Counter.dev's privacy
GA4 is the furthest thing from Counter.dev on this list, so read it as the honest step away from privacy-first. It earns a place only because it is free hosted at any volume and does far more, with Google Ads and Search Console integration and free BigQuery export that no privacy tool here offers. The price is every tradeoff Counter.dev exists to avoid.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Former Counter.dev users who need Google Ads attribution or deep free reporting
- The catch:
- It uses cookies and needs a consent banner and GDPR handling, its interface is complex, and explorations sample above 10 million events per query.
Compared to Counter.dev
- Advantage: Free hosted at any volume with deep, capable reporting
- Advantage: Google Ads and Search Console integration, plus free BigQuery export
- Tradeoff: Sends visitor data to Google, the opposite of Counter.dev's no-IP stance
- Tradeoff: Uses cookies and needs a consent banner Counter.dev never required
- Tradeoff: Far more complex than Counter.dev's single page
- Tradeoff: Explorations sample above 10M events per query and retention caps at 14 months
How to choose
Umami is the pick for most people: the same cookieless privacy, but with a small company, a dependable free hosted plan, and the events and funnels Counter.dev never had. If you want an established privacy brand and will self-host or pay, Plausible is the polished option. GoatCounter is the closest like-for-like if you want to stay this minimal, though it shares Counter.dev's solo-project risk. Reach for PostHog or Matomo only if the missing features were the real reason, and know that Clarity and GA4 trade away the privacy that brought you to Counter.dev in the first place.