GoAccess review 2026: how this open-source real-time web log analyzer works, its terminal and browser dashboards, pricing (its free), features, pros, cons.
GoAccess is a free, open-source, real-time web log analyzer that runs as a terminal dashboard or generates a self-contained HTML report. Created by Gerardo Orellana, who published its first version in July 2010, it has remained a community-maintained project with no corporate ownership, funding rounds or commercial edition.
Written in C and dependent on very few libraries, most notably ncurses, GoAccess parses logs from web servers and cloud services including Apache, Nginx, Amazon S3 and CloudFront, processing them entirely on infrastructure the operator already controls.
In terminal mode, GoAccess presents a curses-based dashboard with panels for unique visitors, requested files, referrers, 404 errors, operating systems, browsers and geographic location, all navigable over SSH with keyboard shortcuts. In HTML mode, it generates a single self-contained report that can connect over WebSocket to a running process for live-updating charts in a browser.
It supports custom log formats via configurable format strings, reading compressed or multiple combined log files, IP geolocation when paired with a MaxMind GeoIP database, visitor and bot filtering, and JSON export for piping parsed data into other tooling.
GoAccess is free, open-source software with no commercial edition, subscription tier, or hosted SaaS product. It can be installed via most Linux package managers, Homebrew on macOS, or compiled from source at no cost.
Support is community-driven through the project's GitHub repository, mailing list and documentation rather than a paid support contract, since there is no company behind GoAccess selling enterprise plans.
Yes, GoAccess is free, open-source software with no commercial edition or subscription tier. It can be installed at no cost via most package managers or compiled from source.
No. GoAccess works entirely by parsing existing web server log files, so it requires no client-side JavaScript tracker on the website being analyzed.
Yes, GoAccess can run in real-time mode, continuously updating its terminal dashboard or HTML report as new lines are appended to the log file it is watching.
GoAccess supports common formats from Apache and Nginx as well as Amazon S3 and CloudFront logs, and it also supports fully custom log formats via configurable format strings.
GoAccess was created by Gerardo Orellana, who published its first version in July 2010, and it has remained a community-maintained open-source project since.
Yes, GoAccess can generate a self-contained HTML report with charts, and that report can optionally connect over WebSocket to a running GoAccess process for live updates in the browser.