Cloudflare Web Analytics is free, cookieless, and sometimes literally zero code. It's also deliberately light on features. Here's exactly where it helps, where it stops, and what to switch to.
For a plain "how many people visited and where did they come from" question, Cloudflare Web Analytics genuinely delivers — free, cookieless, and if your site is already proxied through Cloudflare, enabled with zero code. It stops being enough the moment you need to track a specific button click, hand a dashboard link to a client, pull raw rows into a spreadsheet, or dig past the top-line numbers.
The rest of this guide is the detail: what Cloudflare Web Analytics actually does well, exactly where it runs out of road, a straight comparison table, and a 15-minute switching guide.
It's easy to dunk on a free tool for being basic. That's not fair here — Cloudflare Web Analytics was built as a lightweight, privacy-first, aggregate view, not a full analytics platform, and judged against that goal it does its job well.
It's genuinely free — no card, no trial clock, available at every Cloudflare plan tier including the free plan. It's cookieless and privacy-first by design: no cookies, no browser storage used to track visitors across sessions, which is exactly the profile that lets many sites skip a cookie consent banner (confirm your specific setup — this is general guidance, not legal advice).
The install story is the best part. If your site's DNS is already proxied through Cloudflare — the orange-cloud setting — Cloudflare can inject the tracking beacon automatically at the edge. You flip it on in the dashboard and you're done; there's nothing to paste into your code. If your site isn't proxied through Cloudflare, or you're using Cloudflare for other services without proxying DNS, you add a small JavaScript beacon snippet to your pages yourself, the same way you would with any other analytics tag. Either path gets you a working visitor count with almost no setup time.
The same design choice that makes Cloudflare Web Analytics simple also makes it shallow past a certain point. None of the following is a knock on the product — it's an honest description of a tool built for a narrower job than "replace your analytics stack." As of this writing, and worth double-checking against Cloudflare's current documentation before you rely on any of it:
Individually, any one of these is a minor inconvenience. Together, they're the reason people search for an alternative: the moment you need to prove a marketing campaign drove signups, or hand a client their own numbers, the aggregate view stops answering the question.
Here's the honest comparison, described qualitatively where we can't cite a specific number with confidence. Pricing and feature gating change over time on every one of these products — verify current specifics on each vendor's own site before you commit.
| Tool | Hosting | Cookieless | Custom events | Raw export | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | Hosted (Cloudflare) | Yes | No (as of this writing) | GraphQL API only — no CSV button | Free |
| GhostMetrics | Hosted | Yes | Yes, on the free plan | Yes, CSV/JSON, every plan | Free-forever (1 site) + $9.99/mo flat Pro |
| Plausible | Hosted, or open-source self-host | Yes | Yes | Check current plan | Subscription (hosted) or free self-host |
| Fathom | Hosted only | Yes | Yes | Check current plan | Subscription |
| Umami | Self-host (open source), hosted option available | Yes | Yes | Yes, full access when self-hosted | Free to self-host; hosted plan subscription |
| Matomo | Self-host (open source), or Matomo Cloud | Configurable | Yes | Yes, full access when self-hosted | Free to self-host; hosted plan subscription |
| Simple Analytics | Hosted | Yes | Yes | Check current plan | Subscription, check current pricing |
A few things worth calling out directly. GhostMetrics — full disclosure, ours — is the one tool here matching Cloudflare's price (free) while also giving you custom events and full raw export on that free tier; it installs with a single script tag, roughly 3 KB compressed on the wire (10 KB uncompressed), served from Cloudflare's own edge network. Plausible and Umami are both open source, which makes them the right call if self-hosting or full data ownership is a hard requirement — Umami is free to run on your own server, and Plausible offers both a hosted plan and a self-host route. Matomo gets you the closest to GA-style depth with self-hosting. Fathom and Simple Analytics are both simple, hosted, subscription tools worth a look if you'd rather pay a flat fee than self-host — see our dedicated write-ups on Fathom and Simple Analytics for the deeper detail on each. For the broader field beyond this shortlist, our cookieless analytics comparison covers more tools side by side.
None of the above means you should automatically switch. If your site is already proxied through Cloudflare, you want the least possible setup work, you don't need to track specific buttons or export raw rows, and an honest visitor count without a cookie banner is genuinely the whole job — Cloudflare Web Analytics remains a good, free, zero-maintenance answer. It's arguably the least amount of work of anything compared in this guide, and "good enough, free, already there" is a legitimate reason to keep using a tool.
The switch becomes worth the fifteen minutes it takes (see below) once you hit one of the specific limits above: a client asking for their own dashboard link, a launch you need to attribute to a specific campaign via a tracked click, or a spreadsheet analysis that needs the raw rows rather than a summary screen.
You don't have to rip anything out blind. Run the new tool alongside Cloudflare Web Analytics for a day or two, confirm the numbers make sense, then turn the old one off. Here's the whole process, using a cookieless tool as the example.
<script defer src="https://ghostmetrics.nullagency.io/gm.js" data-site="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script><head> (5 min). Hand-coded site: drop it in the header template. WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow: use the "custom code / header injection" box in settings so it loads on every page.That's the entire migration — no data warehouse, no consultant, no downtime. Want to see the destination before you start? The GhostMetrics live public demo is our own real traffic, dashboard and all, with no signup required to look at it. Full plan details, including the flat $9.99/mo Pro tier, are on the pricing page.
GhostMetrics is our own cookieless web analytics tool, and we dogfood it on this site. The free plan is free forever — one site, unlimited pageviews, real-time data, every dashboard view — and unlike the gaps we just walked through, it includes custom events (a simple data-gm-event attribute on any element, or a ghostmetrics.track() call) and full raw export — every stored row, every column, as CSV from the dashboard or JSON from the API — on every plan, free included.
Need more than one site or a public dashboard link to share? Pro is $9.99/mo flat, with a 30-day free trial — a card starts the trial, nothing is charged for 30 days, cancel anytime — and it adds exactly two things: unlimited websites under one login, and a shareable public dashboard URL. That's the whole difference — export and events stay on the free plan.
Start free — no card, no banner See the live demoDisclosure: GhostMetrics is built by Null Agency and we use it on this site, so we're not a neutral party about our own product — we've kept the claims to what the free and paid plans actually do, and pointed to open-source options (Plausible, Umami) where they fit better. Cloudflare Web Analytics details reflect our understanding as of this writing; Cloudflare's docs are the source of truth for current feature and retention specifics. Nothing here is legal advice; confirm your own privacy and cookie obligations for your jurisdiction.