Adjust vs Pirsch

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.

Pirsch is a privacy-friendly web analytics service developed and hosted in Germany. It measures traffic without cookies and without storing personal data, using daily-rotating anonymous fingerprints instead, which allows most European sites to run it without a cookie consent banner and keeps all data inside the EU.

Besides a lightweight JavaScript snippet, Pirsch can track entirely server-side through SDKs and integrations for languages and platforms such as Go, PHP, Node.js and WordPress, so ad blockers do not interfere and no client script is required. Dashboards cover pages, referrers, UTM campaigns, countries, devices, entry and exit pages, custom events with metadata and conversion goals, and data is available through an API, shareable dashboards and email reports. Pricing is tiered by monthly page views, with a Standard plan for small sites and a Plus plan that adds more advanced features and capacity for agencies and larger sites.

Pirsch suits European businesses, developers and agencies that need GDPR-friendly website analytics, particularly when server-side tracking matters. It is a smaller, less known product than Plausible or Fathom Analytics, which offer similar privacy positioning with larger communities and integration lists, and Matomo is the choice for teams that want a full Google Analytics-style suite on their own servers. It is not a product analytics tool, so in-app behavior and retention analysis belong in PostHog or Mixpanel.