Keitaro vs Cometly

If you are down to Keitaro and Cometly, the honest starting point is that these two were built for two different jobs, and for two different kinds of company. Both sit somewhere under the word attribution, but they answer completely different questions. Keitaro is a self-hosted campaign tracker and routing engine for paid-traffic affiliates and media buyers: it stamps every click, sends it to the right page, and tells you which source made money. Cometly is a B2B SaaS revenue attribution tool: it ties ad spend to money that arrived in Stripe and to deals in a CRM. The reader stuck between them is really deciding what they buy traffic for.

The honest short version. Keitaro runs on a server you own, charges a fixed monthly fee with no click cap, and reads which source, lander and offer made money. Cometly runs in the cloud, meters your monthly pageviews, and ties paid spend to Stripe revenue and a CRM pipeline through the Comet Pixel and server-side events. Which of those two shapes fits how you work is most of the answer.

The one question that decides it: what you buy traffic for

Answer this before you compare a single feature. Do you buy traffic for affiliate offers, pushing volume to pages that may live on domains you do not even own? Or do you sell B2B SaaS or a subscription through a longer, sales-assisted funnel that closes in a CRM weeks after the click? If your problem is seeing which source, campaign, lander and offer produced a profit at click-level, across high volume and any traffic type, that is Keitaro's problem to solve. If your problem is knowing which campaign produced a trial that became a paying customer weeks later, and getting that signal back to the ad platforms so they optimize toward revenue instead of raw form fills, that is what Cometly is for.

Your business model makes the decision. Keitaro assumes you run direct-response traffic at scale and want click-level ROI plus your data on your own hardware, which is why it is self-hosted, flat-priced with no click cap, and built to route visitors and read profit by source. Cometly assumes a Stripe subscription or a CRM pipeline and a sale that takes weeks, which is why it writes pre- and post-form touch history onto each deal in HubSpot or Salesforce, the part a CRM's own tracking usually cannot see across a long journey. Ask Keitaro which ad closed a B2B software deal and it has no CRM data to answer from. Point high-volume affiliate traffic at Cometly and you are metering a revenue-attribution tool on a job it was never built for. Knowing which of those two sentences describes you settles most of the choice.

Keitaro: own the data, route the traffic, run the box

Keitaro is one of the most established self-hosted trackers media buyers run. Its maker, Apliteni, has shipped it for years and says more than 4,000 businesses run it. It installs on your own Linux server, so your click and conversion data lives on hardware you control, and the price is a flat monthly license with no cap on clicks: a buyer pushing hundreds of millions of pop, push or native clicks a month pays the same tier as one pushing a few million, and the bill never climbs because a campaign won. That flat, uncapped model is the whole reason volume buyers pick it over event-priced cloud trackers.

It is also a real routing engine, not only a tracker. Its filtering splits visitors to different landers and offers across geo, device, OS, browser, connection and source ID, over 35+ tracking parameters, deeper than a cloud tracker built around a single ad account exposes. It fires server-side postbacks to your networks, sends conversions back to Meta, Google and TikTok through their APIs, and pulls ad spend in for real cost and ROI, all on every plan rather than gating cost sync behind a higher tier. A built-in landing page editor, custom domains with SSL and bot filtering keep fewer separate tools between your tracker, your lander and your offer.

Two honest cautions keep it from being an automatic pick. Self-hosting is the real cost and the real risk: the flat license is only as good as the VPS under it, and keeping that machine (CentOS 9 or 10 Stream, 4GB of RAM as the floor) fast, patched and online falls to you. There is no cloud version, and the license is paid before you can run it, with a public live demo and a refund policy as your preview. And when server-side tracking breaks, the loudest complaint is slow resolution. The sharpest critical review reports 502 errors on conversion tracking and inaccurate cost attribution, with support acknowledging the problem but giving no timeline, and live chat runs business hours, roughly 06:00 to 16:00 GMT on weekdays. We earn no commission on Keitaro, so there is no affiliate button for it here. The full Keitaro review covers where the depth pays off and where the setup bites.

Cometly: ad spend tied to Stripe and CRM revenue

Cometly does a narrower and, for a software company, more useful thing: it ties ad spend to money that actually arrived. Its Comet Pixel and server-side events feed Stripe revenue and CRM deal stages into the attribution, so you see which campaign produced pipeline and closed-won revenue, with MRR and LTV attached, instead of trusting Meta to grade its own homework. It runs first, last, linear, U-shaped and data-driven models across a long journey, and it sends deal-stage-aware events back to Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, Microsoft, Reddit and Snapchat through a server-side conversion API on both plans, so bidding optimizes toward paying customers rather than raw leads. Its G2 record is strong and consistent, 4.8 out of 5 across 36 reviews, with praise clustering on tracking accuracy and fast, human support, and one reviewer reported accurate tracking on over $100,000 a month in ad spend.

Its weak spots are on the buying side. Cometly publishes no price and you cannot try it first: the Core and Enterprise plans are quoted on a sales call and scale with your traffic, and you commit, or at least pay for onboarding, before you see it run on your own traffic. Some buyers report the quote feels high. Ask for the live demo to run on your real numbers, since that is the only look you get before paying. Outside its solid but small G2 record the proof thins out, with Trustpilot at 3.6 and no clear Capterra listing. The full Cometly review walks through the setup and the sentiment in detail.

Two tools for two kinds of business

Each one answers the question its own buyer asks. Keitaro answers which source and page made money at click-level, at high volume, with the data on hardware you own, and it routes the traffic and pushes those conversions back to Meta, Google and TikTok over CAPI on every plan. Cometly ties a software company's recurring revenue to the ads behind it, and feeds that signal back to seven ad platforms. Put a solo B2B founder on Keitaro and they get a fast, deep tracker with no Stripe or CRM connection to tell them which ad produced a paying subscriber. Point a scaling affiliate's pop or push volume at Cometly and they are metering a revenue-attribution tool, on a cloud they do not control, for a job Keitaro does flat-priced on their own server.

So the tie-break is your operation. If you run affiliate offers on paid traffic and live or die by click-level ROI and flat costs, the SaaS-first, cloud-metered attribution tool was never going to serve you. If you sell software or a subscription and need a weeks-long sale tied to the deal in your CRM, the self-hosted tracker has no pipeline to read and no revenue layer to attach. Match the tool to how your revenue actually arrives and the rest of the comparison mostly answers itself. If self-hosting is the specific part of Keitaro you are weighing, our Keitaro vs ClickMagick page runs the self-hosted-against-cloud fork, and Binom vs Keitaro pits it against another self-hosted rival.

Where the pricing diverges

Neither of these prices on the same axis, so there is no crossover point to find. Keitaro is a flat license in euros: Individual Starter at the bottom, €72 for Advanced and €104 for Expert, then €200 and €400 for its Business tiers, with six- and twelve-month terms taking 10% and 20% off, and CAPI and cost sync on all of them. There is no cap on clicks, but there is a server you rent, patch and keep online, and that cost never shows on the invoice. The economics tip in Keitaro's favour precisely when your click count is large, because nothing about the license moves when your traffic does. Cometly does not publish a price at all: its plans are usage-based on monthly pageviews and quoted on a call, so you cannot line its cost up against a competitor before you talk to sales.

Keitaro's number is public and flat, but the server it sits on is a recurring cost and an operational job, so budget the VPS alongside the license. Cometly's usage-based fee climbs as your pageviews grow, so get the quote in writing against your actual monthly traffic, along with what the paid onboarding covers.

A third path if you host the funnel yourself

Both of these tools measure traffic to pages and checkouts that live somewhere else. Keitaro stamps a click, routes it to a lander and an offer, then catches the conversion as a postback after the fact. Cometly reads revenue out of a Stripe account and a CRM that sit elsewhere too. There is a different way to close the same gap, worth naming because it changes where the data lives. ElasticFunnels is a funnel platform for teams running paid traffic that builds the pages and hosts the checkout itself, and keeps its ad-spend and conversion reporting on the same data layer as those pages, the CRM and the sale. Because a sale closes in a checkout it hosts, that conversion is a first-party event it records directly rather than a postback it has to catch, and it fires server-side postbacks to your affiliate networks on purchase, refund, chargeback and renewal, the network-attribution job Keitaro does for click traffic. It also split-tests page variants under one campaign URL, so a test never resets the ad platform's learning. It starts with a 14-day free trial that takes no card, on plans from $97 a month, plus 0.5% only on revenue processed through its hosted checkout, and nothing on sales you run through outside networks.

The honest limit that keeps it on its own line rather than in the table above: ElasticFunnels is newer than either tool here, and there is very little independent third-party review coverage to check its claims against, so until you run real volume through it you are largely taking the vendor's word for how its reporting and postbacks hold up. That is what you would expect of a platform this recent, where Keitaro has more than 4,000 businesses and a long, if mixed, public record behind it, and Cometly has a consistent G2 record you can read before you buy. The pages, checkout and reporting are usable from day one, so what is missing is the outside record. And its reporting covers the funnels it hosts, so an affiliate tracking clicks across offers on other people's domains still needs a dedicated router like Keitaro for that traffic, and a B2B SaaS team attributing a sales-led motion that closes in a CRM it runs elsewhere still needs a tool like Cometly. A subscription seller who takes payment on its own checkout fits it best, because the rebill and the ad click then sit in the CRM it ships with.

Which one for you

You send paid traffic to affiliate offers: Keitaro. Click-level ROI at high volume, deep routing across 35+ parameters, a flat license that never meters your clicks, and your data on your own server are the right call for pop, push, native and direct-response traffic, with CAPI and cost sync included from the cheapest tier. Budget the VPS and the setup time, and start with one small campaign once it is running.

You sell B2B SaaS or a subscription and need ad spend tied to revenue: Cometly. Stripe and CRM revenue attribution, long-journey multi-touch models and server-side conversion feeds to seven ad platforms are the right fit, as long as you can commit without a public price and you see the demo run on your own numbers first.

You host your own pages and checkout end to end: look at ElasticFunnels alongside them, with the newness caveat above in mind, and keep a router like Keitaro for any traffic that closes on domains you do not host, or Cometly for a software sale that closes in your CRM.

Keitaro is our default pick here because more readers who reach this comparison run paid traffic to affiliate offers than sell B2B software. For a B2B SaaS or subscription company tying ad spend to Stripe revenue and a CRM pipeline, Cometly is plainly the better tool, and we would pick it every time over a click tracker with no pipeline to read. If you are actually weighing attribution tools for a software business, our Northbeam vs Cometly and Binom vs Cometly comparisons take the next step. If you are choosing between trackers instead, Keitaro vs AnyTrack and CPV Lab Pro vs Cometly are the ones to read, and you can see where Keitaro lands overall in our ad tracker ranking and the full list of head-to-heads.