Most comparisons of server-side tracking tools are a price table and nothing else. Price matters, but it is the part that changes most often and the part you can check yourself in a minute. The things that are harder to reverse — who owns the account, how long your logs are kept, where the data sits — never make the table.
Here is what we would compare on, and what we know about each option. Where an amount is not stated, it is because nobody here has verified it, and a guessed number is worse than no number.
What to compare server-side tracking tools on
Five things, roughly in order of how expensive they are to get wrong.
Who owns the account. If you are an agency, this decides whether a client leaving is an administrative detail or a problem. At some providers the container belongs to whoever created it, which is usually the agency. That means you keep paying until you remember not to.
How long the logs are kept. This is the one nobody looks at until they need it. If a campaign looked wrong in January and you are asking in March, a provider that keeps logs for a few days cannot answer you.
Where the data sits. For an EU business this is a compliance question with a paper trail attached: a processing agreement, a sub-processor list, and an answer to where the servers physically are.
What it costs at your volume. Not the headline price — the price at the number of requests you actually send, on the billing interval you actually use.
How hard it is to leave. The honest test is whether you can move without asking the provider for anything.
Stape
The default choice, and it earned that. Roughly 22,000 people a month search for the name, which is more than the entire generic category. Free tier up to 10,000 requests, then paid plans at 500K, 5M and 20M.
Two things worth knowing. Their logs are kept for days rather than months — three on the entry plan, ten on the next one up, as listed on their pricing page in August 2026. And their pricing page has a currency selector and a monthly/yearly switch, which is easy to misread: the headline figures are the yearly-billing equivalents unless you flip the switch.
Taggrs
A Dutch provider, and the one you are most likely to meet if you are searching in Dutch. We have not verified their pricing, so there is no number here.
Addingwell
Comes up regularly in this category. Same caveat: not verified, so no number.
Google Cloud, if you run it yourself
Google’s own documentation walks you through running the server container on Cloud Run. It works, and for a large setup it can be cheaper. What it does not give you is the part that tells you whether the thing is measuring — you get a container and a bill, and the monitoring is yours to build. Budget for that, not just for the compute.
Where Tagyard fits
We host the server container on your own subdomain, with the traffic log included rather than sold separately, and we keep it for months rather than days. The account belongs to the customer, not the agency. The servers are in the EU and the sub-processor list says exactly which parties are involved.
The current amounts, next to Stape’s at the same volumes, are on the pricing page — read off their own page in euros at monthly billing, not converted or estimated.
If you are still working out whether you need any of this, what is server-side tracking is the longer answer, and client-side vs server-side tracking is the shorter one. If you are here because of Meta specifically, the Conversions API post is the relevant one. And if the deciding factor is where the data sits, server-side tracking and the GDPR covers that.