Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is a cookie-free, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics built for people who want clean, simple data without the compliance headache. The entire dashboard fits on one screen: pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, top pages, referrers, and goals, all updating in real time. There are no cookie banners required, no GDPR consent hoops, and the tracking script is 54 times smaller than Google Analytics.

The self-hosted Community Edition is free and open source under AGPLv3. You own the data entirely, which appeals to anyone running sites in regulated industries or jurisdictions where Google’s data practices are a liability. Setup runs on Docker with Postgres and ClickHouse under the hood, which means it is not a five-minute install for beginners, but it is well-documented.

The important caveat: the self-hosted version is not feature-equivalent to the cloud. Funnels, user journey tracking, ecommerce revenue goals, the GA4 importer, and SSO are cloud-only. More practically, the Community Edition uses only basic bot filtering, targeting common user-agent strings and known referrer spam. The cloud version runs traffic through 32,000+ data center IP ranges and behavioral pattern analysis. On high-traffic sites, the gap is stark enough that one documented case saw a site jump from 200 to 5,000 apparent daily visitors after switching to self-hosted, making the data useless.

For personal projects, small blogs, and low-traffic SaaS tools, self-hosted Plausible works well and the data is reliable. For sites seeing meaningful commercial traffic, the cloud tier at $9 per month is worth considering. The team behind Plausible is small, independent, and EU-based, which matters to a lot of people choosing to leave Google’s ecosystem.

Plausible Analytics: Pros & Cons