Plugin comparison
Short answer
Pick Jetpack Stats if you want free stats with full history, clicks, downloads and subscriber numbers, and you are fine connecting a WordPress.com account. Pick SwiftWebDev Dashboard if you want no account, cookieless counts stored in your own database, plus PageSpeed scores for any page and site health on one dashboard.
Where a page view goes
An honest look. Rows marked "Stronger" show which plugin does more on that point, and Jetpack Stats wins several of them. Jetpack facts come from jetpack.com and wordpress.org, checked October 2026.
| What you compare | SwiftWebDev Dashboard | Jetpack Stats |
|---|---|---|
| Setup and privacy | ||
| Account or API key needed | No account, no license key, no API key. Install and activate.Stronger | Needs a connection to a WordPress.com account before any data is collected. |
| Google account required | No | No (WordPress.com account instead) |
| Cookies and consent | No cookies or browser storage. Visits are a daily-salted one-way hash, so nobody is followed across days.Stronger | Built to support GDPR compliance. Do Not Track is not honored by default; a code snippet turns it on. |
| Where data is stored | Your own WordPress database. IP addresses are never saved. Raw visits deleted after 48 hours.Stronger | WordPress.com records the visits. IP, user agent and URLs are sent with each view; logs are kept by Automattic for 28 days. |
| Speed and site care | ||
| Front-end script | One small counter script that runs after the page has loaded. | Tracks each view by sending it to WordPress.com. |
| PageSpeed scores and fixes | Mobile and desktop scores for your homepage or any other page, Core Web Vitals and a ranked fix list. No Google API key. PRO adds weekly scheduled tests.Stronger | Not listed |
| Updates and site health | Pending updates, PHP version, Site Health status and recent activity.Stronger | Not listed |
| Admin dashboard and menu | Adds its own dashboard under one SwiftWebDev menu item and restyles the admin menu with your logo. The classic dashboard stays one click away.Stronger | Stats tab inside your WordPress dashboard. |
| Analytics depth | ||
| Free stats | Visitors, page views and sessions for 7, 30 or 90 days, with trends, busiest days and engagement. Top pages and referrers are in PRO. | Views, visitors, top posts, referrers, searches and countries.Stronger |
| History | Free keeps daily totals for 180 days and shows up to 90. PRO adds custom date ranges and CSV export. | Full history kept on the free plan.Stronger |
| Real-time visitors | PRO | Yes, real-time views, likes and comments. |
| Clicks, downloads and video plays | PRO: link clicks, downloads, video plays, forms, on-site search and custom events. | Link clicks, file downloads and video plays on the free plan.Stronger |
| Devices and campaigns | PRO: devices, countries, traffic sources and referrers. | Paid: UTM, device, browser and OS, region and city. |
| Session recordings | PRO, with form inputs masked.Stronger | Not listed |
| Subscribers and WooCommerce | Not included | Subscriber stats and WooCommerce integration.Stronger |
| Price | ||
| Free plan | Yes, works fully on its own. | Yes, any type of site and any amount of traffic. |
| Paid plan | PRO from $25 per year (1 site). $100 for 5 sites, $299 unlimited. | Priced by monthly views, from $8.33 per month billed yearly (first year). Name your price for personal sites. |
"Not listed" means the feature is not on Jetpack's Stats pages. Jetpack sells other products that we do not compare here. Prices in US dollars.
A short tutorial on the six visitor cards in SwiftWebDev Dashboard, how a visit is counted without cookies, and what is kept in your own WordPress database. There is no outside account to connect.
Real visitor stats. No cookies, no Google account. Open SwiftWebDev in the admin menu. Your visitor stats are on the dashboard, in six cards. You do not need a Google Analytics account, and no cookies are used. The top three cards are Visitors, Page Views, and Sessions. Visitors are the unique people who came to your site. Page views count every page they opened. Sessions are separate visits, so one person can have several.
Use the period picker at the top to choose the last seven, thirty, or ninety days. Thirty is the default. Each card compares the total with the period just before it. Green means it went up, red means it went down, and the sparkline shows the daily trend. Visitors over time shows a bar for each day, with page views as a line. Hover a bar to see the numbers for that day. Busiest days shows the average visitors for each day of the week, and names your busiest day.
Engagement adds four numbers: pages per visit, visits per visitor, average visitors per day, and your best day in the period. How is a visit counted? After a page loads, one small script sends a single request to your own site. Bots, link previews, and prefetched pages are skipped. Logged-in users are not counted by default, so your own visits do not inflate the numbers. You can change this in SwiftWebDev Dashboard settings, in your user menu.
There are no cookies and no browser storage. Your server turns the IP address and browser into a one-way code, mixed with a random value that changes every day. The IP address, browser details, and page addresses are never saved. A new session starts after thirty minutes without a page view. Because the code changes daily, a person who visits on two different days is counted once on each day.
Raw visit records are deleted after forty-eight hours. Only daily totals are kept, for one hundred and eighty days, enough to compare ninety days with the ninety before. Everything stays in your own WordPress database. For deeper reports, like real-time visitors, traffic sources, and top pages, there is the separate SwiftWebDev Dashboard PRO add-on. The free stats work fully on their own.
That is cookieless visitor stats in SwiftWebDev Dashboard. Next: Google PageSpeed scores for any page of your site. Subscribe for more SwiftWebDev Dashboard tutorials.
SwiftWebDev Dashboard does not import Jetpack history. Each plugin counts on its own, so you can keep Jetpack Stats running while you try SwiftWebDev Dashboard, compare for a few weeks, then keep one. Expect the numbers to differ a little, because the two count visits in different ways.
More detail in the SwiftWebDev Dashboard docs.
Yes. The free plugin counts visitors, page views and sessions without cookies, and adds PageSpeed scores for any page, updates and site health. It needs no account. SwiftWebDev Dashboard PRO is a separate add-on for real-time stats, top pages, recordings and deeper reports.
Yes. The Jetpack Stats plugin page says it requires a connection to a WordPress.com account, and no data is collected until that connection is made. SwiftWebDev Dashboard works without any account.
SwiftWebDev Dashboard stores counts in your own WordPress database and never saves IP addresses. Jetpack Stats sends each view to WordPress.com, and Automattic keeps the logs, which include IP addresses, for 28 days.
Jetpack says its free plan covers any type of site and any amount of traffic. A paid plan, priced by monthly views, adds UTM, device and region or city stats.
No. SwiftWebDev Dashboard starts counting from the day you activate it. You can run both for a while and keep Jetpack Stats until you no longer need its history.
SwiftWebDev Dashboard adds one small counter script that runs after the page loads, and speed tests only run when an admin clicks Run test. To measure your own site, read how to check your PageSpeed score in WordPress.
Free, no account, and your classic WordPress dashboard stays one click away.