# Traks vs GoatCounter

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/compare/traks-vs-goatcounter/

Every value below is read from Traks's and GoatCounter's own documentation. See https://inetgeek.com/methodology/ for how.

## At a glance

| Criterion | Traks | GoatCounter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| What the free plan includes | The whole product, with no plan tiers or caps from Traks. The only cost is the Cloudflare account it runs in: the page's estimator shows $5/month at 100K events and says 10M Worker requests a month are included before $0.30 per million. | Reasonable public usage, defined by example rather than by number: a personal site or a small-to-medium business is fine, millions of pageviews a day is not. |
| Entry paid plan | None to Traks, which is free and open source. Running it costs Cloudflare's usage pricing, paid to Cloudflare: its estimator starts at the $5/month Workers Paid plan, which it says covers millions of events. | None. The hosted service is free for what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage and funded by donations; beyond that the answer is to self-host rather than to pay. |
| Sites or apps included | Not stated as a number. The page describes multi-site support, with sites grouped into workspaces, and shows no site limit. | Not stated as a number. The hosted service is bounded by what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage rather than by a site count, and the self-hosted app has no such limit at all. |
| Self-hostable | Supported | Supported |
| Works without cookies | Supported | Supported |

## Where they differ

### What the free plan includes

- Traks: The whole product, with no plan tiers or caps from Traks. The only cost is the Cloudflare account it runs in: the page's estimator shows $5/month at 100K events and says 10M Worker requests a month are included before $0.30 per million. ([source](https://traks.dev/))
- GoatCounter: Reasonable public usage, defined by example rather than by number: a personal site or a small-to-medium business is fine, millions of pageviews a day is not. ([source](https://www.goatcounter.com/))
- Lean: none. No documented basis to lean either way on this criterion.

### Entry paid plan

- Traks: None to Traks, which is free and open source. Running it costs Cloudflare's usage pricing, paid to Cloudflare: its estimator starts at the $5/month Workers Paid plan, which it says covers millions of events. ([source](https://traks.dev/))
- GoatCounter: None. The hosted service is free for what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage and funded by donations; beyond that the answer is to self-host rather than to pay. ([source](https://www.goatcounter.com/))
- Lean: none. No documented basis to lean either way on this criterion.

### Sites or apps included

- Traks: Not stated as a number. The page describes multi-site support, with sites grouped into workspaces, and shows no site limit. ([source](https://traks.dev/))
- GoatCounter: Not stated as a number. The hosted service is bounded by what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage rather than by a site count, and the self-hosted app has no such limit at all. ([source](https://www.goatcounter.com/))
- Lean: none. No documented basis to lean either way on this criterion.

## Which should you choose?

Pick Traks if A Cloudflare user who wants to own the whole stack. The software is free and MIT-licensed, deploys into your own account, keeps events in your own bucket and runs on Cloudflare’s $5-a-month Workers plan, with an MCP server for coding agents.

Pick GoatCounter if A personal site or a small business that wants real analytics and no bill. The hosted service is free for what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage, the script is around 3.5 KB, and there is a JavaScript-free tracking-pixel option.

Consider something else: Traks — You want someone else to run it. There is no hosted service: you deploy and update it yourself in your own Cloudflare account, and the page states no data-retention period.

Consider something else: GoatCounter — The traffic is serious or the dependency is. There is no paid tier to escalate to and no commitment behind the hosted service — GoatCounter's own answer to heavy use is to self-host, which is a different job from paying someone.

## Documented by only one

One side documents these and the other does not. An absence is a missing source, not a stated "no" — except where a line says the other page was READ on a date and does not mention it, which is a sourced observation and the only one-sided case this site leans on.

- Kind of free offer: Traks: Always free
- Pricing model: Traks: No subscription. Traks runs in the buyer's own Cloudflare account, so the bill is Cloudflare's usage pricing: a $5/month Workers Paid plan plus metered Worker, Durable Object, Pipelines and R2 usage past the included amounts. The page counts a pageview as about two events.
- Revenue attribution from a payment provider: Traks: Limited — Value sent on a custom event; no payment-provider connection
- AI and search crawler tracking: GoatCounter: Not supported
- GDPR / data residency: Traks: Self-hosted: events are stored in the buyer's own Cloudflare account and bucket rather than on Traks's servers. The page describes the platform as GDPR, ePrivacy and PECR compliant by design.
  - GoatCounter: not stated on https://www.goatcounter.com/, read 2026-09-21. Corrections: https://inetgeek.com/contact/
  - Lean: 78% Traks / 22% GoatCounter — documented, against a vendor page that does not state it (checked 2026-09-21).

## Questions this comparison answers

**Entry paid plan: Traks or GoatCounter?**

Traks: None to Traks, which is free and open source. Running it costs Cloudflare's usage pricing, paid to Cloudflare: its estimator starts at the $5/month Workers Paid plan, which it says covers millions of events.
GoatCounter: None. The hosted service is free for what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage and funded by donations; beyond that the answer is to self-host rather than to pay.

**Should I choose Traks or GoatCounter?**

Pick Traks if A Cloudflare user who wants to own the whole stack. The software is free and MIT-licensed, deploys into your own account, keeps events in your own bucket and runs on Cloudflare’s $5-a-month Workers plan, with an MCP server for coding agents.
Pick GoatCounter if A personal site or a small business that wants real analytics and no bill. The hosted service is free for what GoatCounter calls reasonable public usage, the script is around 3.5 KB, and there is a JavaScript-free tracking-pixel option.