We Measure Without Spying
Most analytics tools work by building a profile on each visitor — following them across the web, recording their behavior, and selling that data to advertisers. Pirsch works differently.
We never identify or track individual visitors across websites. Every dataset is strictly isolated to the site it belongs to. No personal information is stored on our servers, no data is shared with third parties, and your visitors' behavior stays exactly where it belongs: private.
Everything You Need to Grow — Nothing You Shouldn't Have
Pirsch gives you a complete, actionable picture of how people find and use your website — all without relying on cookies or personal data. Here's what we collect on your behalf, and what we never touch.
What Pirsch collects
- Pages visited — See exactly which pages drive engagement and where visitors drop off.
- Referrers and UTM campaign parameters — Understand which channels send you traffic and measure the ROI of every campaign.
- Country, city, and language — Know where your audience is, so you can tailor content and targeting.
- Operating system, browser, and screen resolution — Make informed decisions about device support and responsive design.
- Custom events — Track button clicks, form submissions, downloads, or any interaction that matters to your business.
What Pirsch never collects
- IP addresses (not stored)
- Names, emails, or any personally identifiable information
- Cross-site behavioral profiles
- Data for advertising purposes
Accurate Visitor Counting — Without Storing a Single Personal Detail
To give you accurate metrics, Pirsch needs to distinguish one visitor from another — without storing who they are. We do this using a one-way hashing method that combines three inputs: the visitor's IP address, their User-Agent string, and a salt value that is unique to your website.
The result is an anonymous numeric identifier. The IP address and User-Agent are never stored — they're consumed during the hashing process and discarded. Because the salt changes per website, the same visitor on two different Pirsch-powered sites produces two completely different identifiers. There is no way to link or match them.
To stay in line with GDPR requirements, every session expires after 24 hours. After that, a returning visitor is treated as a new one — preventing any long-term profiling, even in aggregate.
The practical benefit for you: since we use no cookies, your website needs no cookie-consent banner for analytics. Your visitors get a cleaner experience, and you get accurate data — no consent fatigue, no blocked tracking scripts.
Open Source at Its Core — Audit It Yourself
Privacy claims are easy to make. We believe you shouldn't have to take ours on faith. The core engine of Pirsch is fully open source. You can read the code, audit the data pipeline, and verify for yourself that we collect exactly what we say we do — nothing more. Our GitHub repository is public and actively maintained.
Transparency isn't a marketing feature. For us, it's a commitment to the developers and businesses who rely on Pirsch to handle their visitors' data responsibly.
The Problem With "Free" Analytics
Google Analytics has been the default for years — but free has never meant without cost. When you use Google Analytics, you hand over your visitors' behavioral data to one of the world's largest advertising companies. That data is used to build ad profiles, and it exposes you to legal risk: multiple EU data protection authorities have ruled that the use of Google Analytics violates GDPR by transferring personal data to US servers.
Pirsch gives you the same essential metrics — sessions, page views, traffic sources, device breakdowns, campaign tracking — without feeding your audience's data to a third party. Your data lives on servers in Germany, governed by EU law, and belongs entirely to you.
No consent banners. No cross-site tracking. No compliance headaches. Just clear, honest analytics.
Who Pirsch Is For
Pirsch is used by indie developers shipping side projects, agencies managing dozens of client sites, SaaS companies under regulatory scrutiny, and everyone in between. What they have in common is a belief that you shouldn't have to violate your visitors' privacy to understand your own website.
If you've been putting off switching because you assumed privacy-friendly analytics meant worse analytics — Pirsch is the answer to that assumption.
Made and hosted with love in Germany and the European Union
Pirsch Analytics is developed and hosted in Germany, within the European Union. We're fully compliant with GDPR and German privacy laws. Your data never leaves the Hetzner Cloud's German-owned servers in Nuremberg and Falkenstein.
