Comparison

Metricward and Cloudflare Web Analytics

Cloudflare Web Analytics is free, asks for no cookie banner, and if your site already sits behind Cloudflare it turns on with a single toggle. It was built to answer how many people visited and from where, not the questions that come after that.

Keep Cloudflare Web Analytics if

You only need page views, top pages, referrers and Core Web Vitals, and nothing past that.
Your site already routes through Cloudflare, so the automatic setup is one toggle in a dashboard you have open anyway.
You want a genuinely free tool with no volume ceiling, not a free tier that runs out.
Traffic-only reporting was always the whole requirement. A brochure site does not need a funnel.

Look at Metricward when

You need to know which step of a signup or checkout loses people, not just how many pages were viewed.
You want to define your own event with a property, a plan name on signup_started, a duration on video_played, and query on it.
You need retention or cohorts, whether the same visitor is coming back, which Cloudflare has no concept of.
Your site is not proxied through Cloudflare and you do not want to route it there just to get analytics. The manual beacon script still works without that, but the missing funnels and events are the same either way.
You want product analytics of any kind, user-level, account-level, anything beyond a page count.

Side by side

	Metricward	Cloudflare Web Analytics
EU hosting	Yes, Sweden	No, a US company running its own global network
Cookie banner needed	Cookieless mode narrows what needs consent; a lawyer still decides	No, no cookies or client-side storage at all
Setup	One script tag, works on any host	One click if your zone is proxied through Cloudflare, a manual beacon script otherwise
Funnels	Multi-step, with drop-off in people	Not available
Retention cohorts	Cohort grid by day, week or month	Not available
Custom events with properties	Any event, any property, on every screen	Not available, page views only
Core Web Vitals monitoring	Not built yet, on the roadmap	Yes, included free
Event debugger and tracking plan	Live, with schema validation	Not applicable, there are no custom events to validate
Maturity	New	Mature, running at Cloudflare's edge scale for years
Price	Free to 10,000 events a month, paid plans above that	Free, no volume cap

If page views, referrers and Core Web Vitals are the whole question, Cloudflare's tool is free and genuinely good at answering it, and paying for anything else would be a waste. Metricward exists for the moment that question turns into a funnel, a cohort, or an event with a property worth filtering on.

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