EU Sovereignty Score
EU sovereignAnalyticsHeadquarters: IE

GoatCounter: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform, presented as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. It tracks pageviews, referrers, browsers, screen sizes, approximate locations and campaigns, using a small JavaScript snippet, a no-JavaScript image tracker, a backend API, or by importing web server logs. According to its privacy page, GoatCounter itself stores nothing in the visitor's browser and keeps no IP addresses. You can use it as a hosted service at goatcounter.com or run it yourself: it ships as a binary or Docker image and uses SQLite or PostgreSQL.

GoatCounter.com is run by Martin Tournoij, who is located in Ireland. According to the privacy page, data is stored on Hetzner servers in Finland and Germany and is not shared with third parties. The source code is published under a slightly modified version of the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) 1.2. A European organisation can therefore choose between the hosted service and full self-hosting on its own infrastructure.

Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 6, 2026
Headquarters
IE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Vendor-hosted (EU)Verified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Category
Type
Product
Website

How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to GoatCounter

The European alternatives to GoatCounter come from our knowledge base of over 8,000 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

51 European Analytics vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

Is GoatCounter one of many dependencies?

Score your whole stack in about three minutes. Free, no account needed.

Why digital sovereignty matters with GoatCounter

GoatCounter is headquartered in IE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so GoatCounter scores best on data residency.

GoatCounter is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs GoatCounter together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to GoatCounter?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to GoatCounter include Ackee, Adjust and Alceris. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to GoatCounter?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to GoatCounter include Ackee, Aptabase and Counter. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is GoatCounter GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

GoatCounter is headquartered in IE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes GoatCounter an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 6, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

No public compliance evidence has been recorded for this vendor yet. Do you know its DPA or subprocessor list? Something wrong? Suggest a correction

In the changelog

Earlier changes to this page, as listed in the public changelog.

Digital sovereignty in Analytics

Analytics: Business intelligence, data visualisation, web analytics. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

See all →
8 European alternatives to GoatCounter — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score