OakData vs Vercel Analytics
Vercel counts your pageviews. OakData knows your users.
Vercel Web Analytics is convenient, first-party counting for Vercel-hosted apps. OakData works anywhere and turns traffic into people, sessions, and revenue.
If you deploy on Vercel, its Web Analytics is one toggle away: pageviews and custom events flow through your own domain (so ad blockers mostly miss it), there are no cookies, and the Hobby tier includes 50,000 events a month for free. As a traffic gauge built into the dashboard you already use, it's genuinely convenient.
It's also deliberately shallow, and priced in pieces. Visitors are a hash that resets every day, so a returning user tomorrow is a new person, by design. There's no replay, no heatmaps, no funnels, no errors, no revenue. UTM reporting costs a $10 a month add-on, Core Web Vitals live in Speed Insights, a separate product at $10 per project a month, free-tier data lasts one month, and all of it requires hosting on Vercel. OakData runs on any host and answers the questions a daily hash can't.
Side by side
 OakData | Vercel Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Works on any host | Yes | Vercel deployments only |
| Person-level profiles | Yes | None; visitor hash resets daily |
| Identity across visits | Durable fingerprint + identify() | Impossible by design |
| Session replay | Yes | No |
| Heatmaps | Yes | No |
| Funnels | Yes | No |
| Error monitoring | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals | Built-in | Separate paid product (Speed Insights) |
| UTM / campaign reporting | Yes | $10/month Plus add-on |
| Custom events | Yes | Pro and up, 2 properties |
| Stripe revenue & MRR | Yes | No |
| Bot filtering | Layered: UA, IP ranges, ASN, headless | User-agent only |
| Cookie-free | Yes | Yes |
| Pricing | One plan, all features, usage-based | 50K events free; $0.03 per 1K on Pro |
Based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Features and pricing change, so verify anything decision-critical against Vercel Analytics's current site.
Choose OakData if…
- You want to know who came back: Vercel's visitor hash resets daily, so returning users are invisible by design.
- You want the full stack (replay, heatmaps, funnels, errors, Web Vitals, revenue) instead of a pageview counter plus paid add-ons.
- You might not host on Vercel forever: OakData's one snippet works on any host, so your analytics history isn't tied to your deployment platform.
Choose Vercel Analytics if…
- It's a hobby project on Vercel and a free, zero-config traffic gauge is all you need.
- You want numbers inside the same dashboard as your deployments, including preview environments.
- First-party delivery through your own domain to dodge ad blockers is the deciding feature.
Questions
No. It's enabled per Vercel project, served from routes on your Vercel deployment, and set up through the Vercel dashboard; there's no snippet for other hosts. OakData is one script tag on any site, wherever it's deployed.
By design: visitors are identified by a privacy-preserving hash that resets every day, so the same person tomorrow counts as someone new and no cross-day journey exists. OakData is also cookie-free but derives a durable identity from first-party signals, so returning visitors, journeys, and cohorts are real.
On Vercel, performance metrics live in Speed Insights, a separate product billed at $10 per project a month plus usage after a small free tier. OakData includes Core Web Vitals per page in the same plan as everything else.
Yes, and on a Vercel-hosted site it's a sensible pairing during evaluation: keep the built-in counter, add OakData's snippet, and compare. You'll mostly notice the difference wherever people, funnels, or revenue are involved.
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