Counter vs Pirsch Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCounter compared with Pirsch Analytics
Pirsch is the German managed alternative at $6 to $12 a month, adding events, goals, funnels, A/B testing, white labelling, SDKs, and a REST API, with a real company and two founders behind it. Counter has none of that and costs nothing. The moment your analytics need to survive a domain renewal you did not control, Pirsch is the upgrade.
Pirsch Analytics compared with Counter
Counter is a pay-what-you-want, AGPL, solo-developer project with a one-kilobyte script and almost no features beyond daily visitors, referrers, and countries. Pirsch is a real business with SLAs, funnels, testing, and an API. Counter is fine for a personal blog; Pirsch is what you buy when a client is paying you to explain the numbers.
Choose Counter if
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Choose Pirsch Analytics if
German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Counter | Pirsch Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (pay what you want) (free plan available) | $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. | Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial. |
| Free plan | The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. | None; the trial is the evaluation path and there is no free hosted tier. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely | 30 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription. | German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client. |
| Setup time | Under five minutes. Create an account, paste a one-kilobyte script, and the numbers start appearing. There is nothing else to configure. | Minutes for the script or an SDK integration; funnels, goals, and A/B tests take an hour of deliberate configuration, and serving the script from a custom domain adds a short DNS task. |
| Learning curve | None. The dashboard has four sections and no report builder, which is the entire design intent. | Low for the dashboard, moderate for the API and server-side tracking, which is the piece that rewards a developer's involvement rather than a marketer's. |
| Platforms | Web app (German-hosted), Self-hosted (Go binary plus Redis), JavaScript tracking script | Web app (German-hosted cloud), JavaScript tracking script, Server-side SDKs, On-premise installation (Enterprise only) |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required) | GDPR, ePrivacy and TTDSG, CCPA, Data processing agreement available as standard |
| Founded | 2020 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | Germany | Rheda-Wiedenbruck, Germany |
| Ownership | Independent single-developer project, funded by voluntary user payments | Bootstrapped; privately held as Emvi Software GmbH with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Counter
Strengths
- The most conservative privacy architecture in this category: no cookies, no browser storage, no fingerprinting, and no IP processing in the backend at all.
- A tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, which is among the smallest in existence and effectively free in page weight terms.
- No consent banner required, with less to explain to a data protection officer than any competitor because there is less data being handled.
- AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from a Go binary plus Redis, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service.
Limitations
- The hosted service is run by one developer with no SLA and no support commitment, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025, which is a real continuity risk.
- No events, goals, funnels, or conversion reporting at all, so it cannot answer whether a campaign produced signups.
- No meaningful API, warehouse export, or BI connectors, so the data cannot feed anything else you run.
- No teams, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards, which rules it out for agency use entirely.
Pirsch Analytics
Strengths
- Funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling are all included at $12 a month, which competitors reserve for tiers costing several times that.
- Unlimited websites on the Plus plan makes agency economics work without a per-client subscription.
- German company, German hosting, and a standard data processing agreement give the strongest jurisdictional answer available to a German or Austrian privacy review.
- A genuine developer surface: documented REST API, official SDKs, and server-side event submission, all descended from the original open-source Go library.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, only a 30-day trial, which puts it behind Simple Analytics, Umami Cloud, and GA4 for anyone starting from zero.
- Pageview-based pricing means the $6 and $12 headline figures apply at 10,000 monthly pageviews and rise from there; high-traffic sites need to model the slider.
- Self-hosting is gated to a quote-only Enterprise tier rather than being an open-source option, unlike Umami, Plausible, or Matomo.
- No user-level analytics, replay, retention cohorts, or product analytics by design, which is the permanent cost of the cookie-free architecture.
Pricing compared
Counter
Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.
- Hosted (pay what you want)$0
- Self-hosted$0
At a price of zero with an honest request attached, the value question is not really about money, it is about risk and scope. What you get is a fast, tiny, genuinely private visitor counter that answers two questions well and asks nothing of you. What you do not get is events, goals, funnels, an API, teams, or any commitment that the service will exist next year. For a personal site that is an excellent trade and the right thing to do is pay something. For a business, the six to twenty dollars a month that Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom charge buys continuity, support, and a feature set that grows with you, and that is money well spent rather than money saved.
Pirsch Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial.
- StandardFrom $6
- PlusFrom $12
- EnterpriseCustom
The $12 Plus plan is the best price-to-capability ratio in privacy-first web analytics for anyone managing more than one site. Unlimited websites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling at that price undercuts Plausible Business and Fathom on the agency use case by a wide margin, and the REST API and SDKs give developers something the others do not. The costs are the absence of a free tier, which makes it a poor fit for hobby projects, and the pageview slider, which means a high-traffic publisher should check the real number before quoting the headline. Judged as an agency or developer tool, it is underpriced; judged as a first analytics install for a site with no revenue, it is the wrong shape.
Editorial verdict on each
Counter
Counter is the most likeable product in this category and the one you should be most careful about depending on. The privacy engineering is genuinely the strictest here, refusing even to process IP addresses in the backend, the script is a kilobyte, no consent banner is needed, and the whole thing is free with a polite request attached. For a personal blog, an open-source docs site, or a portfolio, it is the right tool and you should pay the developer something. For anything commercial, the absence of events, goals, an API, teams, and any service commitment is disqualifying, and the fact that the domain lapsed once in 2025 is not a detail to gloss over. If you like the philosophy but need reliability, Simple Analytics is free and more capable, Pirsch is six dollars and far deeper, and Umami is the open-source version to self-host instead.
Read the full Counter profilePirsch Analytics
Pirsch is the best-value tool in privacy-first web analytics for anyone who runs more than one website or writes code. Twelve dollars a month buys unlimited sites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling, which is a combination the better-known names in this category charge several times more for or do not offer at all, and the REST API and SDKs make server-side tracking a real option rather than a footnote. The German company and German hosting is the cleanest jurisdictional answer on the market for a European privacy review. Two honest caveats: there is no free tier, so a pre-revenue project is better served elsewhere, and self-hosting is an Enterprise contract rather than an open-source right. If you are an agency or a developer, this is the first thing to try in the category.
Read the full Pirsch Analytics profileCounter profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Pirsch Analytics last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.