sonex vs Cloudflare Web Analytics

Cloudflare Web Analytics is free, honestly private, and deliberately limited. It answers “how much traffic, from where, how fast” and stops there. sonex costs money and answers the questions that come after that, starting with whether the traffic earned anything.

If your site does not sell anything, this comparison may end with you keeping Cloudflare, and that is a fine outcome.

Checked against Cloudflare’s own product and developer documentation on 2026-08-17, plus a direct measurement of both scripts.

At a glance

	sonex	Cloudflare Web Analytics
Price	Free 2k events, then $20/mo	Free on all Cloudflare plans
Cookies or local storage	None	None
Fingerprinting	No	No, explicitly stated
Consent banner	Not needed	Not needed
Tracker size (brotli, measured)	2,968 bytes	10,034 bytes
Pageviews, referrers, top pages	Yes	Yes
Core Web Vitals	Yes	Yes
Geography	Country, region, city	Country
Custom events	Yes	Not documented
Funnels, retention, attribution	Yes	Not documented
Session-level views	Yes	Not documented
Revenue from Stripe or Polar	Yes, all plans	No
Compare two date ranges	Yes	Not documented
Public shared dashboards	Yes	Not documented
Query API	Yes	Not documented for this product

Rows marked “not documented” mean we could not confirm them from Cloudflare’s own pages. We are not going to assert a competitor lacks a feature on the basis of not finding it.

Cloudflare’s privacy story is genuinely good

Worth saying plainly, because it is unusual for a company of that size: Cloudflare states that Web Analytics “does not use any client-side state, such as cookies or localStorage” and that it does not fingerprint individuals via IP, user agent or any other data.

That is the same structural position sonex takes, described just as precisely. Nobody choosing between these two products should be doing it on privacy grounds — both of us have removed the thing that creates the problem.

Where Cloudflare wins

It is free, with no volume limit we could find. For a personal site, a documentation site, or a business site that does not transact, that is difficult to beat with a paid product, and we would not try.

It is already there. If you use Cloudflare, enabling it takes a click.

Server-side option. Sites proxied through Cloudflare can get analytics without a script at all, which is the only configuration in this entire category that costs the visitor nothing.

Where sonex wins

Revenue. Cloudflare’s product has no concept of money, and adding one is not on its trajectory — it is infrastructure telemetry that happens to be readable by humans. sonex reads Stripe or Polar and puts earned revenue on the same chart as the traffic, on every plan.

Depth. Funnels, retention cohorts, attribution models, user journeys, session-level browsing, custom events, a compare mode for any two ranges.

Geography that resolves further. Country, region and city against country.

Sharing and querying. Public shared dashboards for a client or a co-founder, and a query API for pulling numbers somewhere else.

A lighter script. 2,968 bytes against 10,034 — a smaller gap than most in this category, but ours is a third of theirs.

The realistic decision

Cloudflare Web Analytics is a good free tool that has drawn its scope tightly and stayed there. That is a design decision, not a shortcoming, and it means the comparison is not close on either side:

• A site that does not sell anything: Cloudflare is free and sufficient. Keep it.
• A site that sells something: the question you actually have is whether the traffic paid for itself, and Cloudflare’s product does not have the vocabulary to answer it.

Some people run both — Cloudflare for infrastructure-level traffic and performance, something with revenue in it for the commercial questions. There is no conflict; neither sets a cookie.

Facts checked against Cloudflare’s own product and developer documentation on 2026-08-17. Script sizes measured the same day.