Adjust vs Counter

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner (MMP) founded in Berlin in 2012 and acquired by AppLovin in 2021 in a deal valued at about $1 billion. It tells app marketers which ad networks, campaigns and creatives drove installs, in-app events and revenue, so budget can move to the channels that actually pay back. Its SDK runs inside iOS, Android and Unity apps.

The platform covers attribution and deep linking, Datascape dashboards and cohort reporting, a Fraud Prevention Suite that blocks click spam and fake installs, and support for Apple's SKAdNetwork and AdAttributionKit privacy frameworks. Add-on modules include InSight for incrementality testing with synthetic control groups, Audience Builder, CTV AdVision for connected-TV campaigns and SpendWorks for ad-spend mapping. The free Base plan covers up to 1,500 attributions per month; Core and Enterprise are custom-priced annual contracts.

Adjust suits app publishers, games studios and fintech or ecommerce apps with real paid user-acquisition budgets. AppsFlyer is its biggest rival with a larger partner ecosystem, while Singular leans harder into cost aggregation. Northbeam and Rockerbox, also in our catalog, solve web and DTC attribution rather than app installs, so they are not like-for-like replacements.

In May 2025 Adjust launched Growth Copilot in beta, an AI assistant that answers reporting questions in plain language and, with Pulse, can publish scheduled AI reports. When negotiating, ask for fraud prevention to be bundled, since it is often quoted as a separate add-on.

Counter is a free, open-source web analytics service at counter.dev that focuses on the essentials: page views, unique visits, referrers, countries, devices, browsers, screen sizes and time-of-day patterns. It runs from a single lightweight script, does not use cookies and does not track individual users across sites, which keeps pages fast and avoids most of the privacy problems that come with traditional analytics.

There are no paid tiers in the usual sense. The service is free to use and funded by voluntary pay-what-you-want contributions, and the source code is public so technically minded users can inspect how data is collected. Setup takes a minute: create an account, paste the snippet and the dashboard starts filling in. The dashboard shows a short set of charts on one page rather than dozens of reports.

Counter is a good fit for personal blogs, portfolios, documentation sites and side projects where the owner only wants to know whether people visit and where they come from. It is not built for businesses: there are no custom events, goals, funnels, conversion tracking, segments or team features, and support is community level. GoatCounter is a similar free and minimal option, Cloudflare Web Analytics is free for sites on Cloudflare, and Plausible, Fathom or Umami are the next step when you need events and goals with a privacy-first approach.

Because it is so minimal, Counter works well alongside other tools rather than as a long-term analytics stack for a growing company.