GoatCounter vs Plausible

Yes, on the public hosted instance at goatcounter.com, for personal and non-commercial use under what Martin Tournoij calls reasonable use. The informal ceiling is around 100,000 pageviews per month, and traffic spikes are tolerated rather than enforced as a hard quota. Personal blogs, portfolios, hobby projects, and open-source documentation sites all qualify. What does not qualify: company sites generating revenue, SaaS dashboards, e-commerce. Those are commercial use and require a Personal+ plan starting at five dollars per month. The free tier is funded out of pocket, so do not abuse it — but it is not a trial.

No, and this is a hard ceiling. There is no funnel feature, no goals UI, no multi-step conversion view in GoatCounter — neither on the hosted instance nor in self-hosted. The maintainer has been clear that funnels are out of scope for the project. If you need to measure a flow like landing page to pricing page to signup to paid, GoatCounter will show you the four pageview counts but will not stitch them into a funnel with conversion rates. This is the single biggest feature gap versus Plausible Business and a real reason to pick Plausible if funnels matter to you.

GoatCounter wins by a wide margin. It is a single static Go binary with SQLite as the default datastore, runs on roughly 50 MB of RAM, and the entire deployment is downloading a binary, pointing a domain at it, and running goatcounter serve. Backups are copying one SQLite file. Plausible Community Edition runs Elixir, Postgres, and ClickHouse as separate services, needs around 4–5 GB of RAM at a realistic floor, and ClickHouse in particular has operational concepts you will need to learn. If your reason to self-host is simplicity, GoatCounter is the answer.

Not on the free hosted plan. Custom event tracking is a paid-tier feature on goatcounter.com, available from the Personal+ plan at five dollars per month. The free tier is strictly pageviews and referrers. On self-hosted GoatCounter, events are available because you are running the binary yourself with no plan gating. This is one of the cleaner arguments for self-hosting if you want events plus the free price tag — the trade is that you now run the server. Plausible, by contrast, has custom events on every paid plan, but custom event properties and groupings are gated to Business.

Plausible has a more developed Google Analytics import path. You can connect a GA property and Plausible will pull historical data into your dashboard so you do not lose the timeline when you switch. Coverage is not 1:1 — some custom dimensions and event shapes do not map cleanly — but the basic page and referrer history comes across. GoatCounter has a CSV import for log files and its own export format, but no first-class GA4 connector. If preserving years of GA history during migration is important, Plausible is the smoother path. If you are starting fresh on a new site, neither matters.

GoatCounter is a single-maintainer project — Martin Tournoij has run it since 2019 and has been steady about it. The codebase is small, clean Go and has stayed that way. The bus factor is one, which is a real risk for any business-critical infrastructure. The mitigations: it is fully open source under EUPL, the data model is simple enough that you could fork or migrate, and the self-hosted binary will keep running with no server-side dependency on the goatcounter.com service. For a personal blog this is fine. For a company committing to a single analytics tool for the next decade, plan for the maintainer-bus-factor case.