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Frequently asked questions

• What is Cloudflare Web Analytics best at?

  Being free and genuinely privacy-first. It ships with every Cloudflare plan, works on any website with a single script tag, sets no cookies and reports real Core Web Vitals with percentile breakdowns, filterable by URL, browser, OS and country. For a no-cost read on traffic and Chrome-side performance it is hard to beat. Pulsetic focuses on what it leaves out: vitals beyond Chromium, unsampled history, and the uptime side of the job.

• Does Cloudflare Web Analytics show Core Web Vitals?

  Yes, and it deserves plain credit for that: LCP, INP and CLS, plus FCP and TTFB, shown at p75 by default with p50, p90 and p99 available. The catch is that these numbers come from Chromium-based browsers only, so Safari and Firefox visitors contribute nothing, and rendering problems that only show up there stay invisible. Pulsetic measures load times in every modern browser and records each vital wherever the browser reports it, so those visits are in your numbers too.

• How long does Cloudflare Web Analytics keep my data?

  The dashboard reaches back 6 months at most. Unsampled data is kept for only 7 days; after that you are looking at roughly 10% aggregates, and heavy queries can be sampled further. Pulsetic stores every pageview it records, unsampled, for up to 5 years, depending on your plan.

• Can Cloudflare Web Analytics tell me when my website is down?

  No. Web Analytics has no uptime monitoring, no alerting and no status pages. Cloudflare sells Health Checks for that, but it is a separate product on paid plans, with zero checks on the Free plan. Pulsetic includes status pages and checks your website as often as every 30 seconds from up to 15 regions. Alerts go out by email, webhook, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, SMS, WhatsApp and phone call, and status page subscribers get emailed updates.

• Is Pulsetic a drop-in replacement for Cloudflare Web Analytics?

  No. Pulsetic is not a traffic analytics tool: it does not track goals, custom events, funnels or UTM campaigns, and Cloudflare's tool is free, so keep it if its reports serve you. What changes when you add Pulsetic: vitals from any browser that reports them instead of Chromium only, load times from every modern browser, pageviews kept without sampling, retention of up to 5 years, and uptime monitoring with status pages built in.

• Does Pulsetic's tracking script use cookies?

  No. Like Cloudflare's beacon, Pulsetic sets no cookies and writes nothing to localStorage, and there is no client-side visitor identifier at all. Up to two small performance beacons per pageview, and no sampling at any stage.

• What does Pulsetic cost when Cloudflare Web Analytics is free?

  Nothing, to start: the free plan includes 1,000 RUM pageviews a month, 10 uptime monitors and status pages, commercial use allowed. Paying buys what the free tool never includes: $9 covers 10,000 pageviews, $19 covers 100,000, $49 covers 200,000, and extra pageviews cost $5 per 100,000. Support comes from humans rather than a community forum.

• When should I switch from Cloudflare Web Analytics to Pulsetic?

  When Chromium-only vitals, sampled history and a 6-month window stop being enough, or when you need the uptime half of the job: knowing your website is down before customers tell you. Pulsetic covers both: uptime checks, alerting and status pages come with the free plan. RUM analytics can be kept for up to 5 years, depending on your plan. And since both scripts are small and cookieless, plenty of teams simply run the two side by side.