Simplytics vs Cloudflare Web Analytics
Cloudflare Web Analytics is free, sets no cookies and installs with one script tag, and for many sites that is the right answer. But it reports visits rather than visitors, keeps data unsampled for only the first 7 days, and shows the previous six months. Simplytics counts unique visitors and every pageview, and keeps held daily totals with no scheduled expiry, for $12 a year.
| Simplytics | Cloudflare Web Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $12/year | Free, on every Cloudflare plan |
| Cookies | None | None — no client-side state at all |
| Consent assessment | Site-specific | Site-specific |
| Script size (compressed) | ~1.2 KB | ~9.9 KB (measured September 2026) |
| Unique visitors | Yes — short-lived keyed daily hash | No — a “visit” is a page view whose referrer is another host |
| Sampling | No — every pageview is counted. Funnels count up to 25,000 pageviews at a time, so on a busy site or over a long range they show a minimum | Yes — unsampled for 7 days, then aggregated to ~10%; queries sample between 0.0001% and 100% |
| Stats retention | No scheduled expiry while held | The previous six months |
| Core Web Vitals & page load time | No | Yes — LCP, INP, CLS and a load-time breakdown |
| Custom events & goals | Yes — JS API + click attribute, with conversion rate | No — the FAQ says “not yet” |
| UTM campaigns | Yes | No — query strings are deliberately not logged |
| Funnels | Unlimited on every paid plan; up to 100 during the free trial | No |
| Bounce rate & session duration | Yes | No — not among the reported metrics |
| Live visitor count | Yes | No |
| Websites | Unlimited | Ten per account (soft limit); no limit when proxied through Cloudflare |
| Email reports | Weekly or monthly summary + automatic traffic spike alerts | Weekly summary — its only notification type |
| View-counter badge (site & per-page) | Yes — live SVG | No |
| Public dashboards | Yes | No |
| Global Privacy Control | Honoured by default | Not honoured |
| Analytics data location | Primary DB: EU (Warsaw); India access | Not committed — “may be processed in a different country or region from where it originated” |
Prices and features verified from official Cloudflare Web Analytics pages, September 2026. Script sizes are compressed transfer sizes.
Where Cloudflare Web Analytics is better
- It is free at any traffic volume, on every Cloudflare plan. Simplytics has no free tier beyond the trial.
- Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP and CLS) plus a DNS/TCP/request/response page-load breakdown. Simplytics measures none of that.
- If your site is proxied through Cloudflare, the numbers are also collected at the edge, where an ad-blocker cannot remove them. Our script and their beacon can both be blocked; only Cloudflare has that server-side fallback.
- Nothing new to sign up for if you already use Cloudflare for DNS or the CDN.
Where Simplytics is better
- Unique visitors, not just visits. Cloudflare’s “visit” is a page view whose referrer is a different host, not a count of people.
- Every pageview is counted. Cloudflare keeps unsampled beacon data for 7 days, then aggregates it to around 10%, and its dashboard queries sample between 0.0001% and 100%.
- Held daily totals have no scheduled expiry, unlike Cloudflare’s six-month display window.
- Custom events with conversion rates, funnels and UTM campaigns. Cloudflare has none of these, and its FAQ answers “not yet” to both custom events and UTM parameters.
- Bounce rate, session duration and a live visitor count, none of which Cloudflare reports.
- A ~1.2 KB script instead of ~9.9 KB.
- Global Privacy Control is honoured by default: a visitor who sends it is not counted unless the site owner switches that check off. Cloudflare Web Analytics does not honour it.
- A public dashboard you can share and a live view-counter badge you can embed on the page itself.
Which should you pick?
If it has to be free, take Cloudflare Web Analytics: a fast, private pageview counter with the best performance metrics on this page. Choose Simplytics when you need exact counts rather than sampled ones, more than six months of history, unique visitors, or events, funnels and campaigns, or when you want a shareable dashboard or an embeddable view counter.
Frequently asked questions
Cloudflare Web Analytics is free. Why pay $12 a year?
Because the free count is sampled after 7 days (to around 10%), covers six months, and counts visits rather than unique visitors. Simplytics counts every pageview, keeps held daily totals with no scheduled expiry, counts unique visitors, and adds events, funnels, campaigns, a public dashboard and an embeddable view counter. If none of that matters for your site, Cloudflare is the better deal.
Do I have to move my DNS to Cloudflare to use it?
No. It works on any site with a script tag, though you need a free Cloudflare account for the site token. Proxying your DNS through Cloudflare adds edge-collected numbers an ad-blocker cannot strip, and removes the ten-site soft limit for sites that are not proxied.
Does Cloudflare Web Analytics use cookies?
No. Cloudflare states that it “does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage”, and that the visitor IP is discarded at the nearest data centre. Simplytics sets no cookies and stores nothing in the browser either (its script only reads an optional “don’t count my visits” flag a site can offer), but on the server it keeps a short-lived keyed daily hash to count unique visitors, which Cloudflare does not.
Why does Cloudflare sample my data?
Volume. Cloudflare serves sites from a handful of requests a day to billions, so after the first 7 days it stores roughly a 10% sample and estimates from it. For a large site the estimate is very good; for a small one it is an approximation, which is why Simplytics, built for small sites, simply counts.
Compare Simplytics with others: vs Google Analytics · vs Plausible · vs Fathom · vs Simple Analytics · vs Matomo