GoatCounter – open source web analytics
www.goatcounter.com

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/46782639

Goatcounter is so minimal that it takes a minute to wrap the brain around, but the good news is that it tracks all access anonymously, which is all I ever wanted (and why I simply have never made real use of Matomo over the years). It is the digital equivalent of a step counter, and acts like those counting clickers they use at concerts to track number of attendants.

It is good to confirm people are actually able to access tooling. That is all I need.

  • miaowoo_lw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    3 hours ago

    Running it on a couple of small sites. It is exactly what the pitch says: one Go binary or one container, a single Postgres/SQLite DB, one script tag. Points worth knowing before you commit:

    • The hosted version has a free tier for non-commercial sites; self-hosting is completely free, no account needed, and backup is just “dump the database”.
    • Because it counts pageviews anonymously by design, there are no funnels, sessions, or referrer chains like Plausible/Matomo. It deliberately does not keep enough data for that. If you might want path analysis later, that is the one thing Goatcounter will not give you.
    • Bot filtering is reasonable out of the box; on a small tech site I saw roughly 30-40% of raw hits classified as bots, which matched my nginx log estimates well.
    • Self-host gotcha: behind a reverse proxy, make sure you pass the real client IP (X-Forwarded-For), or everything counts as one visitor from the proxy address.

    For the “step counter” use case you describe, it is the best fit in this space. The moment you want cohort/behavior analytics is when Matomo or Plausible earn their resource cost.