A detailed comparison of two lightweight, open-source Google Analytics alternatives — GoatCounter and Plausible — with a focus on privacy, self-hosting, and ease of setup. GoatCounter is written in Go, uses a privacy-preserving session hashing approach (rotating salt every 4 hours), supports non-JavaScript tracking, and is straightforward to self-host. Plausible is built with Elixir, offers a more polished UI, and has a much smaller tracking script (781 bytes vs GA's ~18KB), but self-hosting is experimental. Both tools avoid storing personally identifiable information. The piece also covers Google's extensive passive tracking via GA and DoubleClick cookies, and briefly mentions proprietary alternatives like Simple Analytics and Fathom.
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