Vercel Analytics vs Clycyo: Beyond the Deploy Platform
Vercel Analytics is convenient if you deploy on Vercel. Where it stops — events, attribution, errors, revenue — and what a full tracker adds.
Vercel Analytics wins on friction: if you deploy on Vercel, it is one toggle and a package install away, privacy-friendly, and integrated into the dashboard you already check. For a side project, that convenience is decisive. The question is what happens when the project grows a business around it — because the toggle's simplicity is also its ceiling.
Where Vercel Analytics is genuinely good
- Zero-config setup inside the Vercel ecosystem, cookieless by default.
- Speed Insights: solid field Web Vitals tied to deployments.
- Clean pageview, referrer, and country reporting with no banner.
The ceiling, concretely
- Custom events are constrained. Event volume is plan-limited and properties are thin — fine for 'button clicked', cramped for product analytics.
- No identity model. No identify(), so the anonymous-visitor-becomes-customer journey — the spine of revenue attribution — cannot be expressed at all.
- No revenue events. 'Which channel produces MRR' is out of scope by design.
- No error capture. JS exceptions live in yet another tool, disconnected from the sessions they broke.
- Platform coupling. Analytics tied to hosting means migrating hosts orphans your data, and non-Vercel properties (the WordPress blog, the docs subdomain elsewhere) need a second tool anyway.
Side by side
| Capability | Vercel Analytics | Clycyo |
|---|---|---|
| Cookieless pageviews | Yes | Yes |
| Web Vitals (field) | Yes (Speed Insights) | Yes, on the visitor record |
| Custom events + rich properties | Limited | Yes |
| identify() / user journeys | No | Yes |
| Revenue attribution (webhooks) | No | Yes |
| JS error capture | No | Yes |
| Works on any host | Vercel-centric | Anywhere a script tag loads |
| Public shareable dashboard | No | Yes — see ours |
The practical recommendation
Shipping a weekend project on Vercel? Flip the toggle and move on. The moment the project has signups and a Stripe account, you have outgrown what a hosting add-on can express — and since Clycyo installs in a Next.js app with one script tag and runs happily alongside Speed Insights, the upgrade path is not even a migration. Run both, compare for two weeks on the free tier, and keep the one that answers business questions, not just traffic ones.