Build-in-public founders post it, agencies use it instead of a monthly PDF, sponsors ask for it before they buy a placement. Here's how GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, Cloudflare, and GhostMetrics actually handle a public stats page — and what you should never put on one.
"Share my analytics publicly" means different things per tool. Some ship a dedicated public-URL toggle. Others make you build a second report and manage access to it by hand. One doesn't offer public sharing at all.
Public analytics didn't start as a marketing gimmick — it solves a handful of specific, recurring problems.
Build-in-public founders post real traffic and growth numbers as part of the pitch: no PR spin, just a live dashboard anyone can check against the claims in the tweet. The dashboard link is the receipt.
Agencies showing clients results use a public or shared dashboard instead of compiling a monthly PDF. A live link means the client can check traffic whenever they want, and the agency stops spending an afternoon a month exporting charts into a slide deck.
Sponsors and advertisers often ask for proof before they buy a placement — a newsletter or blog quoting a monthly-readers figure is a lot more credible with a dashboard link attached than a screenshot that could be from any month, or any site.
Open-source projects share adoption numbers — pageviews on docs, traffic to a landing page — as a transparency signal to contributors and users, the same instinct that leads a project to publish its roadmap or its GitHub star history in the open.
These are meaningfully different mechanisms, not the same feature with different names. Worth understanding before you pick a tool for this specific use case.
GA4 was never built around a public-facing view. There's no toggle on the GA4 property itself that produces a URL anyone can open. The common workaround is to build a report in Looker Studio connected to your GA4 data, then either grant specific Google accounts viewer access to that report or configure the report's own link-sharing settings. That's a second artifact to build and keep in sync with the property — not a switch you flip. Check Google's current Looker Studio and GA4 docs for exactly what sharing options exist today.
Plausible supports public dashboards and shared links — a way to make a site's stats viewable by anyone with the link, without them needing a Plausible login. It's one of the more established public-sharing implementations in this list, in keeping with Plausible's general design toward simple, shareable stats. Which plan tiers include it and how it's configured is worth checking on Plausible's current docs, since plan details change.
Fathom offers a shareable dashboard along similar lines — a link that surfaces a site's stats to people who don't have a Fathom account. As with Plausible, check Fathom's current docs and pricing for the specifics of how it's enabled and what it shows.
Umami includes a share URL per website, available whether you're running self-hosted Umami or Umami Cloud. It's part of what makes Umami a reasonable pick for teams who want public sharing without leaving the open-source ecosystem — check Umami's current docs for exactly what the share link exposes.
Cloudflare Web Analytics is the outlier here: there's no public-dashboard or share-link feature at all. Its reporting lives inside your Cloudflare account dashboard, visible only to people with access to that account. If public sharing is a requirement, Cloudflare Web Analytics doesn't have an answer for it today — short of pulling the numbers yourself through Cloudflare's GraphQL Analytics API and rendering your own page.
GhostMetrics (Pro plan) ships a dedicated publish toggle per site. Flip it and the dashboard — every panel, the same one you see logged in — becomes available at a read-only public URL, no login required for viewers, with a small "Powered by GhostMetrics" banner at the bottom. It's not white-label and there's no per-viewer password option; it's public or it isn't. Flip the toggle off and the URL 404s immediately. The how-to below walks through the exact steps.
One row per tool, same three questions: can it be made public, how, and what should you check before you rely on it.
| Tool | Public sharing | How | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| GA4 | Indirect | Build a separate Looker Studio report, then grant access or configure its link-sharing | No public URL for the raw GA4 property itself; check current docs |
| Plausible | Yes | Public dashboards / shared links | Check current docs/pricing for plan gating |
| Fathom | Yes | Shareable dashboard link | Check current docs/pricing for plan gating |
| Umami | Yes | Per-site share URL | Same feature self-hosted or on Umami Cloud; check current docs |
| Cloudflare Web Analytics | No | N/A | Dashboard is private to your Cloudflare account |
| GhostMetrics | Yes (Pro) | Publish toggle → ghostmetrics.nullagency.io/public/<site-id> | Pro only — on the free plan the publish toggle won't stick; unpublish any time (instant 404) |
The practical split: GA4 makes you build and maintain a second thing to get a public view; Plausible, Fathom, Umami, and GhostMetrics each treat it as closer to a built-in setting; Cloudflare Web Analytics doesn't offer it at all. If public sharing is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, that rules Cloudflare Web Analytics out and makes GA4 meaningfully more work than the rest.
Six steps. The only one that touches code is the install tag in step 2 — if the site already has GhostMetrics running, you start at step 3.
<head>:<script defer src="https://ghostmetrics.nullagency.io/gm.js" data-site="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script>https://ghostmetrics.nullagency.io/public/<site-id> and shows every dashboard panel, read-only, to anyone who opens it — no login needed.That's the entire mechanism — there's no separate report to build, no access list to maintain per viewer. Every data panel you see logged in is what a public visitor sees — the only things stripped are the owner controls (Share, Export data, Add site, Manage, and the compare-to-previous-period toggle). Which is exactly why the next section matters.
A public analytics link feels harmless because it's "just traffic numbers." In practice, a full dashboard — any tool's, not only GhostMetrics's — can leak more than intended. Check for these before you flip the switch on any tool.
Referrer URLs carrying tokens. Most cross-origin referrers arrive as a bare origin these days — browsers default to strict-origin-when-cross-origin, which strips the path and query. The leak that actually bites is your own site: same-origin navigations still send the full URL. A visitor who lands on /reset?token=… or /invite?code=… and then clicks through to another page puts that entire URL, token included, in your referrers table — and on a published dashboard, in plain view of anyone with the link. Audit your own token-bearing URLs and set a stricter Referrer-Policy on those pages before you publish.
Custom event names that reveal your roadmap. GhostMetrics's Custom Events panel — like the equivalent in other tools — is visible on the public dashboard along with everything else. An event named beta-feature-x-clicked or internal-tool-signup tells a competitor exactly what you're testing before you've announced it. Name events with public visibility in mind, or don't publish a site that has sensitive ones.
Tiny-traffic sites where one visitor stands out. Aggregate stats anonymize well at volume; they don't at ten visits a day. GhostMetrics's "who's looking" panel identifies the organizations behind visits. It hides residential ISPs by default — but the badge that says so is a toggle, and a public viewer can click it and see those rows too (the dashboard fetches the full list either way). So on a low-traffic site, a single visit from a specific company is effectively an identified visitor — not anonymous at all once the numbers are that small. The same math applies to any tool's geography or referrer breakdown on a quiet site.
Competitor intelligence. The same org-detection panel that's a feature for sales teams is a liability in public: a competitor can see who else is shopping you, and you can see who's shopping them, on any site that publishes its dashboard. If a specific company visiting your pricing page is information you'd rather keep internal, that's a reason to keep the dashboard private, or to weigh it against the transparency you're aiming for before publishing.
GhostMetrics is cookieless web analytics with a public-dashboard toggle built in — no second report, no access list, no infrastructure. Free plan is free forever: one site, unlimited pageviews, real-time dashboard, every view, full history — publishing publicly is a Pro feature.
Pro is $9.99/mo flat, unlimited pageviews, unlimited websites, with a 30-day free trial — a card starts the trial, nothing is charged for 30 days, cancel anytime. Publish a site and its public URL shows every panel read-only with a small "Powered by GhostMetrics" banner; unpublish any time and the URL 404s instantly. Raw event export as CSV or JSON is available on every plan, including free.
Start free — publish when you're ready See the live public 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 Pro plans actually do, and pointed to GA4, Plausible, Fathom, Umami, and Cloudflare's own public-sharing features where they exist. Pricing and plan details for third-party products can change; always check the vendor's current pricing and docs before deciding.