GoatCounter VS PostHog

Compare GoatCounter vs PostHog and see what are their differences.

GoatCounter

Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data. (by arp242)

PostHog

🦔 PostHog provides open-source product analytics, session recording, feature flagging and A/B testing that you can self-host. (by PostHog)
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GoatCounter PostHog
61 99
4,160 17,013
2.6% 7.2%
8.2 10.0
2 days ago 7 days ago
Go Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

GoatCounter

Posts with mentions or reviews of GoatCounter. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-05.
  • Show HN: Shareable Analytics for public stats. Customize sections and themes
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    47 projects | dev.to | 5 Feb 2024
    GoatCounter — GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform available as a hosted service (free for non-commercial use) or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy-to-use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. The free tier is for non-commercial use and includes unlimited sites, six months of data retention, and 100k pageviews/month.
  • GoatCounter creator is hoping to raise at least €1k for basic living expense
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Jan 2024
    > Not sure when GoatCounter started

    "Hello, world" - arp242 committed on May 28, 2019 - 66a4d7f9b7af8dccacaf3ad8a9fb57a9f9008030 - https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/commit/66a4d7f9b7af8dc...

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024)
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jan 2024
    Location: Ireland (Galway)

    Remote: yes

    Willing to relocate: yes

    Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

    Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

    Email: [email protected]

    I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

    In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

    I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

  • Goatcounter: Easy web analytics. No tracking of personal data
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
  • Using Analytics on My Website
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.
  • Ask HN: Is Google Analytics that useful?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Sep 2023
    I'm self-hosting GoatCounter and using it across all my websites.

    Apart from controlling my data, I also have more accurate visitor statistics, as it doesn't get picked up by script blockers, unlike GA.

    https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter

    https://www.goatcounter.com

  • What has your personal website/blog done for you?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Sep 2023
    I first used basic google analytics but found it too invasive/heavy so I switched over to https://www.goatcounter.com/.

    For comments, most solutions were also too heavy, paid or had ads, but I finally found https://giscus.app/.

    So while I did add these 2 features, I'm happy with those variants that I managed to find.

  • Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2023)
    13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Aug 2023
    Location: Ireland

    Remote: yes

    Willing to relocate: yes

    Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

    Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

    Email: [email protected]

    I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

    In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

    I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

  • Ask HN: Looking for Google Analytics alternative after v4
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Jun 2023

PostHog

Posts with mentions or reviews of PostHog. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-12.
  • How Telemetry Saved my Open-Source Platform
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Apr 2024
    It would be a shame not to mention PostHog as the telemetry provider we are using, since it turned out to be extremely useful. Because it is hard to find people who will talk with you about your product, gathering statistics gave us a much greater insight into our users.
  • Free tools for developers to build their apps
    4 projects | dev.to | 5 Jan 2024
    6- PostHog
  • Using Analytics on My Website
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Dec 2023
    Hi HN, PostHog employee here. I'm working on our Web Analytics product, which is currently in beta. It's fun to see us mentioned here :)

    I should mention that we have a ton of SDKs (see https://posthog.com/docs/libraries) for back end frameworks and languages, so if you wanted to use PostHog without any client-side JS you could send pageviews and other events manually, but for the vast majority of people it makes more sense to use our JS snippet.

    Hijacking this comment to share the roadmap for web analytics https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/issues/18547. It's very much in the launch-early-and-be-embarassed phase, but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions that people have, particularly if you're already a PostHog user.

  • Show HN: Flywheel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Dec 2023
    how's this different than https://posthog.com/ ?
  • Open Source alternatives to tools you Pay for
    21 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2023
    PostHog - Open Source Alternative to Mixpanel
  • Show HN: Monitor your webapp with minimal setup
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2023
  • Ask HN: Where to Store Logs?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Oct 2023
    Don't insert the logs/events/analytics into your Application DB. Usually, you send those to specialist datastores (OLAP etc) that process such high volume of data. You can use something like clickhouse [0] for example or use 3rd party SAAS solutions like posthog [1] etc that are built on top of clickhouse

    [0] https://clickhouse.com

    [1] https://posthog.com

  • Ask HN: What would you use to build a mostly CRUD back end today?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2023
    I may use Flask-Admin initially to offload the "CRUD" operations to have an initial prototype fast but then drop it ASAP because I don't want to write a "flask-admin application" to fight against later on. If the application is mainly "CRUD", then Flask-Admin is suitable.

    Now...

    Would you do a breakdown/list of all the jobs you've done by sector/vertical and by function/role and by application functionality?

    - [0]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com

    - [1]: https://flask-admin.readthedocs.io/en/latest

    - [2]: https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/2.3.x/patterns/celery

    - [3]: https://sentry.io

    - [4]: https://posthog.com

    - [5]: https://www.docker.com

  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2023)
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jul 2023
    PostHog | Remote (US/Europe timezones) | Full stack engineer, technical ex-founder, tech lead | https://posthog.com

    PostHog is the only open-source Product OS, combining product analytics, session recordings, feature flags, cdp and a data warehouse in one.

    We have a culture of written async communication (see our handbook [0]), lots of individual responsibility and an opportunity to make a huge impact. Being fully remote means we're able to create a team that is truly diverse. We're based all over the world, and the team includes former YC founders, CTOs turned developers and recent grads.

    To apply see https://posthog.com/careers or email us [email protected]

    [0] https://posthog.com/handbook/

  • planetsin.space -- a PI management and reminder tool
    1 project | /r/Eve | 3 Jul 2023
    There seems to be posthog.com analytics and AB or feature flag functionality that is blocked by adblockers. Probably that?

What are some alternatives?

When comparing GoatCounter and PostHog you can also consider the following projects:

Plausible Analytics - Simple, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics.

Snowplow - The enterprise-grade behavioral data engine (web, mobile, server-side, webhooks), running cloud-natively on AWS and GCP

Fathom Analytics - Fathom Lite. Simple, privacy-focused website analytics. Built with Golang & Preact.

Matomo - Empowering People Ethically with the leading open source alternative to Google Analytics that gives you full control over your data. Matomo lets you easily collect data from websites & apps and visualise this data and extract insights. Privacy is built-in. Liberating Web Analytics. Star us on Github? +1. And we love Pull Requests!

Umami - Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

Sentry - Developer-first error tracking and performance monitoring

GoAccess - GoAccess is a real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser.

Grafana - The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more.

Ackee - Self-hosted, Node.js based analytics tool for those who care about privacy.

openreplay - Session replay and analytics tool you can self-host. Ideal for reproducing issues, co-browsing with users and optimizing your product.