Pirsch is the cheapest credible privacy-first analytics tool with EU hosting. They’re a small German team, and they’ve built a tight, fast product. We respect what they’ve shipped.

Pirsch and mcp-analytics aren’t direct substitutes. Different interface bet. Honest case for each:

Where Pirsch wins

Price floor. Pirsch’s $6/month Standard tier is the cheapest credible EU-hosted analytics on the market. If you have a personal site with under 10k pageviews/month and want it paid (no card-on-file dependency we have on free tier), Pirsch is cheaper. We’re free up to 100k, then €19. For a tiny site, Pirsch wins the dollar-comparison.

AI-referrer channel. Pirsch has shipped an “AI” channel in their dashboard that groups referrers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude.ai, etc. Human visitors who clicked through from an AI chat. Useful pre-built filter. We track the same data (in top_referrers), but we don’t have a UI grouping for it because we don’t have a UI. You’d ask in chat “how much of last week’s traffic came from AI referrers?”.

Polished dashboard. Pirsch’s dashboard is clean, fast, German-engineered. If you want a dashboard, Pirsch’s is good. We don’t have one.

Same-country hosting. Pirsch is hosted in Germany. We’re hosted in Germany. Both products are built by German companies. From a GDPR posture perspective, this isn’t a differentiator. But if “100% German company, German data, German support” matters to you, both check the box.

Mature product. Pirsch has been live since 2021, has paying customers, has shipped through GDPR shifts. We’re newer.

Where we win

Free tier with no card. Pirsch is trial-only (30 days, then paid). We have 100k hits/month free forever, unlimited sites, all 23 MCP tools. For new projects where you don’t know if they’ll succeed, that free runway matters.

Volume headroom at €19. €19/month buys 10,000,000 hits with us. With Pirsch, 100k pageviews lands somewhere around $10-24/month depending on tier, and higher volumes climb from there. The point isn’t the exact dollar, it’s the headroom: if you have any chance of a Hacker News spike, a newsletter sendout, or a viral tweet, you’ll hit a Pirsch volume cap long before ours.

MCP-native interface. The product’s reason for existing. Your stats live in your existing Claude / ChatGPT / Cursor session.

You: "Last week's pageviews vs the previous week. What's the
     biggest change?"
Claude: "Pageviews 42,180 vs 31,420, up 34%. The big jump is on
        /pricing (8.2k vs 3.1k). Top new referrer is reddit, post
        thread on /r/selfhosted from Friday."

Bot crawler visibility. Pirsch tracks AI-referrer (human-from-AI). We additionally classify AI crawlers themselves (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, ByteSpider, etc.). You see how often your site is being indexed by AI training/answer systems. Pirsch filters those out silently.

Server-side tracking that classifies AI crawlers out of the box. Credit where due: server-side is Pirsch’s home turf. They started as a server-side Go library, and their official Go, Node, and PHP SDKs are their recommended integration path. So this isn’t a gap on their side. The difference is what the server-side data becomes. Our server-side tracking (an HTTP ingest endpoint authenticated with a per-site secret, plus a first-party Rack middleware for Ruby) classifies AI crawlers into eight traffic classes automatically, and the answers land in your Claude or Cursor chat instead of a dashboard. npm and other framework wrappers are on our roadmap.

Unlimited sites on every tier, including free. Pirsch includes 50 sites on Standard and unlimited on Plus, so this only matters if you want unlimited without paying for Plus. On our free tier, it’s already there.

When you should pick Pirsch

  • Your traffic is small and stable (<10k/month) and you’d rather pay $6 than worry about free-tier limits.
  • You want a clean dashboard, and the built-in AI-referrer channel speaks to your use case.
  • You don’t use Claude/ChatGPT/Cursor as a daily workflow.

When you should pick us

  • You spend hours daily in Claude or ChatGPT and want analytics inside that flow.
  • Your free runway matters. No card, no time limit.
  • You may spike. €19 buys you 10M hits of headroom.
  • You want explicit AI-crawler visibility, not silent filtering.
  • You want server-side traffic classified (AI crawlers included) without building it yourself.

What’s not a real difference

  • Both EU-hosted, both German companies.
  • Both cookieless by default.
  • Neither needs a cookie banner under typical EU interpretation.

Migration

Run both in parallel for a month. Add our tracking snippet alongside Pirsch’s (no conflict). Ask the same questions in both. Pick whichever workflow fits better for your situation.

A sensible split is Pirsch on the public marketing site (the dashboard is useful for non-technical contributors) and us on internal tools and side projects (where the chat workflow is faster).

Try it

Sign up free, 100k hits/month, no card.

Specific Pirsch feature you can’t live without? Email us.