Plausible
Cookie-free, EU-hosted website analytics with an open-source core, built as a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics.
Who it's for
Builders who want to see traffic and conversions without a cookie banner, a Google account, or a dashboard full of metrics they never check.
Standout details
- No cookies and no persistent identifiers, so no consent banner is required under GDPR; all data processing stays on EU-owned infrastructure
- Starter is $9/mo for 10,000 monthly pageviews on one site; Growth adds up to 3 sites and team seats at $14/mo; Business adds funnels, revenue attribution and Stats API access at $19/mo, and all three prices scale up as traffic grows past 10k
- The tracking script is reported as roughly 54 times smaller than Google Analytics' script, so it adds negligible page weight
- A self-hosted Community Edition is free under AGPLv3, though it drops funnels, SSO, the Sites API and premium support, and ships updates only twice a year instead of weekly
- Recently added AI-crawler traffic monitoring, flagging visits and referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude alongside normal traffic sources
What it is
Plausible is a website analytics tool built around a single idea: show the essentials on one screen without tracking anyone individually. It counts pageviews, visitors, referral sources, and goal completions, then adds funnels, revenue attribution, and a Search Console connection on top for the paid Business tier. The company has been bootstrapped and independently run since 2018.
It does not use cookies or store any persistent identifier per visitor, so EU privacy law does not require a consent banner for it, which matters to anyone tired of cookie popups on their own site. All processing happens on infrastructure the company owns in Europe.
Who should use it
Solo builders, content creators, and small SaaS teams who want to know what is working on their site without becoming an analyst first. The 30-day trial requires no credit card, which makes it easy to run in parallel with an existing GA4 setup before switching over. Anyone who genuinely needs cohort analysis, heatmaps, or session replay should look elsewhere, since none of that is part of the product at any tier.
What stands out
The pricing structure rewards knowing your traffic level ahead of time. Starter, Growth, and Business all quote their listed price at 10,000 monthly pageviews and climb from there, so the entry price is a floor, not a flat rate. Growth is really about collaboration (three sites, three team seats, shared links) rather than new analytics capability, and Business is where the product gets genuinely more capable: funnels, revenue attribution, custom properties, and Stats API access all sit behind that $19 floor.
The self-hosted Community Edition is a real option, not a token gesture. It is free, AGPLv3-licensed, and the full source is on GitHub. The tradeoff is concrete: no funnels, no SSO, no Sites API, only basic bot filtering, and new releases twice a year instead of the cloud product’s weekly cadence. That is a fair trade for someone who wants to run it themselves, but it is not the same product as the paid cloud tier.
The verdict
Plausible earns its reputation among indie hackers by doing exactly what it promises and nothing more: fast, cookie-free traffic numbers on one page. That same restraint becomes a limit once a site’s questions go beyond pageviews and referrers. There is no built-in path to session-level debugging or deep segmentation. Choose it for the simplicity and the privacy story, not as a like-for-like Google Analytics replacement.
Honest verdict
Plausible is the analytics tool to reach for when a single clean dashboard and no cookie banner matter more than deep segmentation. There is no free cloud tier, so a personal project pays $9 a month from day one, and self-hosting to avoid that cost trades it for running your own server and losing funnels, SSO and weekly updates. Skip it if you need session recordings, heatmaps, or granular UTM and audience segmentation. Being entirely script-based also means an ad blocker or strict browser privacy setting can zero out a visit before it's counted, a tradeoff of avoiding cookies that GA4's server-side options do not share.
Published 9 Sept 2026