Nilly vs VisitStats

nilly offers privacy-first web analytics because we think you should be in full control of your data. With nilly, you can have all the benefits from learning about your website visitors without sacrificing your and your visitors privacy. You do not have to implement any annoying cookie notices and/or consent banners and you get all the information you need in a simple yet informative dashboard. This plugin adds the nilly code automatically to the footer. You can choose your preferred server location and set it to Switzerland or Germany. You need to have a nilly account for the analytics to work. No registration is needed within the WordPress plugin If you have any questions, please contact us here.

VisitStats is a lightweight, privacy-first analytics plugin for WordPress. All your data stays in your own WordPress database — we never see it, no third party sees it. Why VisitStats? No cookies, no consent banner needed. Tracking is GDPR-friendly by default. Self-hosted. All data lives in your WordPress database. No external service, no Automattic, no Google. Lightweight. Frontend tracker is under 2KB. Loads asynchronously. Won’t slow your site. Zero setup. Install, activate, done. No theme edits, no tag manager, no JS snippets. Built for WordPress. Reports appear inside your WordPress dashboard — no separate app to log into. Recommended for sites with up to ~10,000 daily pageviews (around 95% of WordPress sites). For very high-traffic sites, consider dedicated analytics services. What you get (all free, all the time): Real-time visitor count — see who’s on your site right now Pageviews, unique visitors, sessions Top pages Top traffic sources (direct, search, social, AI, referral) Top referrers — actual URLs sending you traffic Device breakdown (desktop, mobile, tablet) Browser & operating system detection Configurable data retention from 1 day up to 1 year Date range views: today, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year Engagement signals (scroll depth, time on page) Cookieless visitor identification using daily-rotating salt + SHA-256 hashing Bot filtering with built-in bot signature detection Optional administrator / logged-in user exclusion Honors Do Not Track browser signal Automatic data pruning to keep your database lean Rate-limited tracking endpoint protects against abuse IP anonymization before hashing — actual IPs never stored Privacy by design VisitStats never: Sets cookies Stores IP addresses Sends data to third parties Fingerprints visitors Tracks across days Visitor identification uses a daily-rotating salt hashed with the (anonymized) IP and User Agent to count unique visits within a 24-hour window. The salt regenerates every 24 hours, making cross-day tracking impossible. This is the same approach used by Plausible Analytics and Fathom Analytics. For developers Clean REST API at /wp-json/visitstats/v1/ Filter hooks for customizing behavior (rate limiting, bot detection, etc.) PSR-style class organization No external dependencies — pure WordPress core