Vince Review, Pricing & Features

Vince is a free, open-source, self-hosted web analytics tool and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. See features and setup details.

Category
Analytics
Pricing
open-source, from Free
Verified
Not yet
Last updated
July 19, 2026
Founded
2024
Web AppOpen SourceSelf-Hosted

What Is Vince

Vince is an open-source, self-hosted web analytics tool built as a lightweight, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It was created by developer Geofrey Ernest, who spent about three years researching how to apply roaring bitmap indexing to analytics event storage before releasing the project.

The tool emerged publicly around late 2024, positioned against existing privacy-focused analytics tools like Plausible Analytics, with the creator citing manageability and efficiency gaps in existing options as the motivation for building Vince.

Vince ships as a single, dependency-free binary written in Go, making deployment simple for developers who want to run their own analytics infrastructure rather than relying on a third-party SaaS provider.

Key Features

Vince tracks pageviews, custom events, goal conversions, outbound link clicks, file downloads, and 404 errors without using cookies, helping sites comply with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR without a cookie consent banner.

It supports unlimited websites and events within a single self-hosted instance, includes automatic TLS support, and uses a lightweight tracking script under 1KB in size to minimize impact on page load speed.

The underlying storage engine uses roaring bitmap indexing to keep the analytics data compact and fast to query, even at meaningful scale, within a single binary deployment.

Pricing

Vince is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. There is no official paid or managed hosting tier; users deploy and run Vince entirely on their own infrastructure at no licensing cost.

Key Features

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Completely free and open source
  • No cookies required, simplifying privacy compliance
  • Very lightweight single-binary deployment
  • Efficient roaring-bitmap storage engine for compact, fast analytics
  • Full data ownership since everything is self-hosted

Cons

  • No official managed cloud hosting option available
  • Requires technical skill to deploy and maintain
  • Smaller community and ecosystem than Plausible or Umami
  • Limited third-party documentation and integrations so far

Pricing

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Vince free?

Yes, Vince is completely free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license, with no paid tiers.

Who created Vince?

Vince was created by developer Geofrey Ernest after several years researching efficient analytics storage using roaring bitmap indexing.

Does Vince use cookies?

No, Vince tracks visitors without cookies, which helps sites comply with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR without a cookie banner.

Can I self-host Vince?

Yes, Vince is designed exclusively for self-hosting and ships as a single dependency-free binary.

Does Vince offer a managed cloud version?

No, as of current research Vince does not offer an official managed hosting service; it is self-hosted only.

How does Vince compare to Plausible or Umami?

Vince offers similar privacy-friendly, cookie-free analytics but is built around a different, highly efficient storage engine and is exclusively self-hosted.

What license does Vince use?

Vince is licensed under AGPL-3.0.

Does Vince support unlimited websites?

Yes, a single Vince instance can track unlimited websites and events.

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