Events-based pricing
Rybbit
$19/mo
- 7-day free trial, card charged after the trial
- All features included on every plan
- 100% unsampled, accurate data
- 3-5+ years data retention
Comparison
Rybbit vs Cloudflare Analytics
Cloudflare Analytics is free but samples your traffic. Rybbit counts every event and adds the features Cloudflare leaves out.
7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
Why consider Rybbit over Cloudflare Analytics?
Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and requires no setup if you're already using Cloudflare's CDN. But free comes with serious limitations. Cloudflare only samples about 10% of your traffic and extrapolates the rest, which means your visitor counts are estimates, not facts. Data is retained for just 6 months, and there's no support for custom events, conversion goals, UTM tracking, or even basic metrics like bounce rate and visit duration.
Rybbit processes 100% of your events with zero sampling, so every number in your dashboard is accurate. You get the full analytics toolkit: custom events with attributes, conversion goals, funnel analysis, session replay, user journey visualization, and 3-5+ years of data retention. Plus, Rybbit works with any website regardless of hosting provider, so you're not locked into Cloudflare's CDN.
Think of Cloudflare Analytics as a basic traffic counter and Rybbit as a complete analytics platform. If you just need to know roughly how many people visited your site, Cloudflare is fine. But if you want to understand user behavior, improve conversions, debug issues with session replay, or just work from numbers you can trust, Rybbit is what you need.
Comparison
Which is right for you?
Choose Rybbit if...
- You need 100% accurate data without sampling (Cloudflare uses 10% samples)
- You want full analytics features: UTM tracking, custom events, goals, funnels
- You need session replay and user journey visualization
- You want 3-5+ years of data retention instead of 6 months
- You need analytics that works without Cloudflare CDN lock-in
- You want open-source software you can self-host
Choose Cloudflare Analytics if...
- You already use Cloudflare CDN and want zero-cost basic analytics
- You only need a high-level traffic overview
- You don't need custom events, goals, or conversion tracking
- You want analytics with absolutely no setup beyond DNS
- Basic Web Vitals monitoring is all you need
Feature by feature
Why choose Rybbit over Cloudflare Analytics?
| Capability |  | Cloudflare Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics Features | ||
| Real-time analytics | ||
| Custom events | With attributes | |
| Funnels | ||
| User journeys (Sankey) | ||
| Conversion goals | ||
| UTM tracking | ||
| Public dashboards | ||
| Advanced Features | ||
| Session Replay | ||
| User profiles | ||
| Web Vitals monitoring | ||
| Error tracking | ||
| Real-time globe view | ||
| Autocapture | ||
| Privacy & Open Source | ||
| Cookie-free tracking | ||
| No personal data collection | ||
| Daily rotating salt | ||
| Open source | ||
| Self-hostable | ||
| Technical & Pricing | ||
| Script size | 18KB | N/A |
| Bypasses ad blockers | ||
| API access | ||
| Starting price | $19/mo | Free |
Pricing
Pricing comparison
Free (bundled with CDN)
Cloudflare Analytics
Free
- Included free with Cloudflare CDN
- Only 10% sampled data (not accurate)
- 6-month data retention limit
- No custom events, goals, or funnels
Cloudflare Analytics vs Rybbit, in depth
What “free” costs you here
Cloudflare Web Analytics is genuinely free, and it's honest about how it manages that. Per Cloudflare's developer docs, the dashboard is built on a roughly 10% sample of page-load events: unsampled data is kept for about seven days before being aggregated, and retention is limited to around 30 days, even though the UI exposes date ranges up to six months. For a high-traffic site a 10% sample still traces the broad shape of things. For a small or medium site it means noisy, incomplete numbers: a page that got 40 visits yesterday might show 20 or 70, and thin segments like a single campaign or country can disappear entirely.
The retention window is the quieter limitation. With unsampled data measured in days and aggregates in weeks, there is no year-over-year comparison, no “how did this launch compare to the last one,” and no long baseline to judge a slow trend against. Rybbit stores every event unsampled at any traffic level, so the number on the dashboard is the number that happened, this month and long after.
A signal vs something you can act on
The deeper difference isn't accuracy, it's the kind of question each tool can answer. Cloudflare Web Analytics answers “is traffic roughly up or down?” For that, it's fine. But it has no custom events, no goals, and no funnels, so it can't tell you whether visitors signed up, where they dropped out of checkout, or which campaign actually converted.
Rybbit is built for the follow-up question: “what should we change?” Custom events with attributes and conversion goals tell you what visitors did; funnels and user journeys show where they stalled; session replay and error tracking show why; Web Vitals monitoring and user profiles round out the picture. All of it ships on every plan, from a ~18KB script that stays cookieless with a daily-rotating salt, so you keep the privacy posture that likely drew you to Cloudflare in the first place.
The actually-free alternative
If free is the requirement rather than a nice-to-have, the honest comparison point isn't Rybbit's cloud plans: it's self-hosting the open-source version. Rybbit's code is open source and self-hosting costs $0 in licenses: you pay only for your own server, and you get unsampled data, full retention under your control, and the complete feature set, with events never leaving your infrastructure. If you'd rather not run it yourself, cloud starts at $19/mo for 100k events with a 7-day trial and every feature on every plan.
When Cloudflare Analytics is enough
Plenty of sites only need a pulse, and Cloudflare Web Analytics is a good pulse. It fits when the budget is zero and self-hosting isn't on the table, when your tolerance for setup is a single copy-pasted beacon (or none at all, if your DNS is already proxied through Cloudflare), and when a rough sense of traffic direction is all anyone will ever ask of it. It also runs happily alongside any other analytics tool, so there's no cost to keeping it while you evaluate something deeper. If you're weighing more options, our guide to the best web analytics tools covers the wider field.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Resources
Related resources
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