vs Cloudflare

Cloudflare Web Analytics alternative: every pageview, plus goals and UTMs

If the site is already on Cloudflare, turn their Web Analytics on. It is cookieless and $0. Cookie Free Analytics is for when you need a visitor that means a person-for-a-day, bounce, campaigns, and goals — and a vendor that is not also terminating TLS.

What they actually are

Two Cloudflare products get mixed up. Web Analytics is a browser beacon (like us): pageviews, referrers, countries, browsers, plus Core Web Vitals. Zone / HTTP analytics is edge request logs — every bot, every asset, not a pageview. Their Web Analytics ‘visit’ is a pageview whose referrer is not you. The same person landing ten times in a day is ten visits. After seven days they keep about 10% of beacons and aggregate. They do not log query strings, so no UTM. Custom events: not yet. We count every collect, hash a visitor for one UTC day, and store the campaign.

When to pick them

You already proxy through Cloudflare, you want a pulse plus Web Vitals, and you do not want another invoice. That is the correct default. Their performance numbers are a real product we do not have.

When to pick us

You are making decisions on traffic mix, campaigns, or ‘did signup fire’. You want bounce and a same-day unique. You want a public dashboard. You are not on Cloudflare, or you would rather the analytics company not also be the CDN.

The honest bit

We will not beat free. We will not beat Core Web Vitals. If their charts answer the question, adding us is vanity. We are not ‘more accurate’ on bots just because we are smaller — both products are a script. We are more complete on marketing metrics, and we do not sample after a week.

Questions

Does Cookie Free Analytics have better metrics than Cloudflare Web Analytics?

For site and campaign questions, yes: unsampled pageviews, a same-day visitor, bounce, sources, UTM, goals, live. For performance (LCP, INP, CLS), no — use Cloudflare. Their ‘visits’ are landings, not people. After a week their dashboard is a sample. Visit duration is first-to-last pageview on our side; neither product guesses time-on-page.

Should I replace Cloudflare Web Analytics with Cookie Free Analytics?

Not automatically. Keep theirs for Vitals and a free pulse. Add us when you need goals, campaigns, or a visitor number you can explain. Many sites run both for a week and look at the gap.

Why are Cloudflare’s visitor numbers higher?

Often because a visit is a landing, bots and prefetch hit the edge (especially on zone analytics), and the same human returning is a new visit. Compare Web Analytics to us, not the HTTP analytics graph — that one is request logs.

Also compared: Google Analytics · Plausible · Simple Analytics · Fathom · Matomo · Umami · All 16