Vercel Analytics is a built-in analytics tool for sites and apps on the Vercel platform. Two products: Analytics (performance and Web Vitals) and Speed Insights (detailed speed metric breakdowns). They emerged as an answer to developers’ need to see real data on how users interact with their site — without hooking up third-party services.
Website: vercel.com/analytics
What’s Inside
Web Vitals Analytics — Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) from real users. Not Lighthouse lab tests, but data from live visitors’ browsers. Breakdowns by device, country, browser version, connection type. You can see that your site lags on 3G in India but runs great on fiber in Germany.
Audience Analytics — traffic, unique visitors, traffic sources, geography. Lighter than GA4, no funnels or conversions. Simply answers the question “how many people visited and where did they come from?”
Speed Insights — detailed performance breakdown for a specific page. Shows which element causes lag, which script blocks rendering, and how much your images weigh. A practical optimization tool, not just a metric.
Privacy
Vercel Analytics doesn’t use cookies, doesn’t collect personal data, and doesn’t require a cookie banner. Data is anonymized. GDPR compliance out of the box — an important argument for European projects.
How to Set It Up
Two lines in a Next.js app:
import { Analytics } from '@vercel/analytics/react';
// In your component: <Analytics />
Or an HTML script for any site — Vercel doesn’t require hosting on its platform. The script weighs a few kilobytes and doesn’t affect performance (loads asynchronously).
Pricing
Web Vitals are free on all plans. Audience Analytics is part of the Pro plan ($20/mo per user). Speed Insights — Pro. If you have a hobby project on Vercel, the basic analytics are more than enough. For commercial sites, Vercel’s Pro plan covers both hosting and analytics.
What’s Good
Integration with the Vercel ecosystem: deployments, analytics, domains, monitoring — all in one dashboard. For Next.js projects, it’s the natural choice.
Performance impact is minimal. The Vercel Analytics script is 5–10 times lighter than Google Analytics. It doesn’t slow down page loads.
Data updates in near real-time. Deploy — and within a minute you see your first metrics.
What’s Not Great
Non-Vercel projects get less out of the integration. Yes, the HTML script works, but deep framework integration is only for Next.js. Nuxt, SvelteKit, Remix — out of luck.
Traffic analytics are superficial. No funnels, events, or conversions. Vercel isn’t trying to replace GA4 — it complements it with performance data.
Vendor lock-in: data lives on the Vercel platform, export is limited. If you leave Vercel, you lose your history.
Verdict
Vercel Analytics isn’t a Google Analytics competitor, and that’s a good thing. For Next.js projects on Vercel, it’s a must-have: free, fast, private. It shows real performance, not synthetic benchmarks. If your stack is Next.js + Vercel, turn it on without a second thought.