A GoatCounter alternative for sites that sell something

Three differences that decide it

1. Events: a name instead of a path

GoatCounter records events by reusing the path field: its own documentation states that the path doubles as the event name, and that there is currently no real way to record the path along with the event. So you can count that a signup happened, but not where it happened. Kipstats stores an event name, a JSON payload and the page, which is what makes a funnel — and a sale attributable to a landing page — possible.

2. Nobody counts the money

GoatCounter has no notion of revenue. Kipstats accepts a purchase from your server, with an amount, a currency and an idempotency key, so a payment confirmed by a Stripe webhook counts even when the customer closed the tab. How revenue tracking works.

3. Friction, which neither a counter nor GA shows

Rage clicks, dead clicks, the form field everyone abandons, the JavaScript error on the page that takes the money: captured without instrumentation, ranked by how often they happen. That is the difference between knowing the checkout converts badly and knowing which button people are hammering.

And what GoatCounter does better

It is free, it is open source, and you can run it yourself on your own machine — Kipstats offers none of those. Its script is about 0.9 KB lighter than ours once gzipped. If self-hosting or reading the server code is a hard requirement, this comparison ends here and GoatCounter wins.