Why it exists

Google Analytics turned a page counter into a legal liability: consent banners, cross-site tracking and Schrems II paperwork for every hit. Pirsch is the "just tell me how many people visited, honestly" alternative — no cookies, no personal identifiers, no third-party tracker in the eyes of GDPR, CCPA and PECR. What makes it more than a dashboard is engineering culture: an AGPL open-source core in Go you can self-host from a single binary, an API backend for server-side counting, official plugins for every major CMS, and importers that migrate your Plausible, Fathom or GA history.

Main features

• Cookie-free, privacy-first by design — no consent banner needed; no PII stored; data hosted on German servers (EU).
• Full dashboard — visitors, sessions, views, referrers, UTM parameters, entry/exit pages, devices, events, one-click filtering, real-time view.
• Events & A/B testing — track custom events, run experiments, segment by tags; advanced features without a second tool.
• Built-in URL shortener — track campaigns through the same pane (a small killer feature for newsletters).
• API-first — REST API for querying and server-side tracking; SDKs and plugins (WordPress, Next.js, Laravel, …) for integrations.
• Self-hostable — single Go binary or Docker, PostgreSQL-backed; the same core powers the cloud.
• Migrations — import from Plausible, Fathom or Google Analytics in a few clicks.

Who it's for

• EU-based sites and agencies that want analytics without legal review of every tracker.
• Developers who prefer querying stats over staring at dashboards (the API-first design).
• Organizations that must keep data on their own servers — the self-hosted mode is first-class, not an afterthought.
• Anyone leaving Google Analytics with years of history they don't want to lose.

How it compares

• Offen — the most radical privacy stance (visitors see and control their own data); Pirsch is the more conventional analyst-facing tool with a richer dashboard and hosted option.
• Plausible / Fathom — the popular lightweight alternatives; Pirsch competes with an open API, A/B testing, and Germany-hosted infrastructure.
• Matomo — the heavyweight classic: more plugins, heavier; Pirsch is leaner and cookie-free by default.
• Umami — nice self-hosted minimalism; Pirsch adds events, A/B tests, shortener and commercial support.

Notes

• Cloud pricing starts around €6/month per site (with trial and live demo on their site); self-hosting is free under AGPL-3.0.
• Because it's cookie-free and stores no PII, most sites can drop their analytics consent banner — verify with your own DPO/counsel, but the design goal is explicit.
• AGPL means hosting it as part of a paid service has obligations; internal company analytics is straightforward.
• The URL shortener and event tags make it a quiet replacement for two extra SaaS subscriptions.

Useful links

• Official site: https://pirsch.io/
• Source code: https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch
• Documentation: https://docs.pirsch.io/
• Live demo: https://demo.pirsch.io/