PlausibleCookie-free, privacy-first web analytics, a lightweight Google Analytics alternative you can run on your own EU servers or buy as managed cloud.
Repo
Plausible
Cookie-free, privacy-first web analytics, a lightweight Google Analytics alternative you can run on your own EU servers or buy as managed cloud.
The cleanest privacy-first analytics you can put in front of a marketing team, cookie-free and GDPR-compliant with no consent banner, from a bootstrapped EU company with no VC and no plans to sell. The catch for self-hosters: the free Community Edition trails the cloud, ships only about twice a year, and leaves out the advanced bot filtering that keeps the numbers honest.
Great for
Marketing and product teams that want simple, cookie-free traffic and goal data with no consent popup, and companies that need visitor data to stay in the EU for GDPR.
The catch
Self-hosting the free CE is real Docker, ClickHouse, and Postgres work, and it lacks the cloud's bot filtering, so busy sites can show inflated visitor counts. A few features are gated to paid plans.
Bottom line
Independent and profitable, funded only by subscribers, so the maintainer is a stable company, not one burned-out volunteer. Most small teams land on the cloud from 9 dollars a month once they price out the ops time.
Self-hostYes (Plausible CE, Docker Compose, ClickHouse + Postgres)
Managed cloudYes (plausible.io, from $9/mo, 30-day trial, no free tier)
LicenseAGPL-3.0 copyleft with network-use obligations; the Community Edition is fully AGPL
LanguageElixir (Phoenix)
Maintained byPlausible Insights OÜ (independent, bootstrapped, EU-based)
Watch out forCE lags the cloud and ships ~twice a year; advanced bot filtering and some features are cloud-only
Cookie-free trackingYes
GDPR / CCPA / PECR compliantYes
Lightweight script (<1 KB)Yes
Goals & conversion trackingYes
FunnelsBusiness plan on cloud; the CE shows a locked funnels report
Ecommerce revenue attributionGated to paid plans, long absent from the free build
Google Analytics importYes
Search Console integrationYes
Stats API + CSV exportYes
Email / Slack reportsYes
Session replay / heatmapsAggregate-only by design; no user-level recordings
Advanced bot filteringFull IP-range and behavioral filtering is cloud-only; CE has basic filtering
What it does
- Cookie-free pageview, visitor, and traffic-source tracking that needs no consent banner, since no personal data or IP address is stored
- Goals, custom events, and funnels that show which pages and campaigns turn visitors into signups and customers
- A single-page dashboard the whole team can read with no training, plus public or link-shared dashboards for clients and stakeholders
- Google Analytics import and UTM campaign tracking, so you can move off GA4 and keep your history
- Google Search Console integration that puts real keyword data next to your traffic
- Weekly and monthly email or Slack reports, traffic spike alerts, and a stats API plus CSV export for your own workflows
What it can’t do
- Show session recordings, heatmaps, or individual user journeys; it measures traffic in aggregate by design, so there is nothing to replay
- Filter bots as well on the free self-hosted CE; the IP-range and behavioral detection that keeps counts clean is cloud-only, so busy self-hosted sites can read high
- Feed Google Ads or Meta conversion tracking cleanly, so teams running heavy paid acquisition often keep a second tool for ad attribution
- Match the cloud feature-for-feature when self-hosted; the CE ships about twice a year and capabilities like large-site sampling are gated to paid plans
- Install and patch itself; self-hosting means running ClickHouse and Postgres and staying on top of security updates, and a serious CE vulnerability sat unpatched on some servers in 2026
Pros & cons
Pros
- Genuinely simple, fast dashboard a marketer can read without training, closer to a clean report than to GA4's console
- Cookie-free and compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR out of the box, so no consent banner and no cookie popup
- Tiny tracking script under 1 KB that barely touches page load, far lighter than Google Analytics
- Bootstrapped, profitable, EU-based company funded only by subscribers, with no outside investors and no stated plans to sell
- Full AGPL Community Edition lets you self-host and keep visitor data entirely on your own infrastructure
Cons
- Self-hosted CE trails the cloud, ships only about twice a year, and misses the advanced bot filtering, so counts can inflate
- Some features, including ecommerce revenue attribution and large-site data sampling, are gated to paid or enterprise plans
- No session replay, heatmaps, or user-level analysis, so product teams that want to watch real sessions need another tool
- Running the CE means operating ClickHouse and Postgres and handling your own upgrades, backups, and security patches
- Weak fit for heavy paid acquisition, since it does not slot into Google Ads or Meta conversion tracking the way GA does
1 positive2 mixed3 critical
What the community says
Plausible: clean, light, very minimal. Great if you only need pageviews.
well, that's the whole point. They keep it free for small sites and gate the paid things for bigger sites. Everyone has to pay bills.
Yeah, I've been wary of plausible after they switched to open core, plus it's always seemed a little heavy due to clickhouse. I've tested Umami, but also wary of that (has some VC funding, its nextjs base led to vulnerabilities being exploited). I'm now testing Goatcounter.
plausible has gated the Ecommerce revenue attribution behind their subscription for a looooong time. Forks like umami went up, but they started rolling out updates to the cloud version first and are always behind with fixes to the open source repository.
Plausible Analytics, with a 8.5GB (clickhouse) database. And this is why I tried Plausible once and never looked back. To get basic but effective analytics, use GoAccess and point it at the Caddy or Nginx logs. It's written in C and thus barely uses memory.
But bot filtering isn't a nice-to-have; it's what makes the numbers meaningful. Without it, at least for sites like mine that get hammered by bots, the self-hosted version is essentially useless.
12 sourcesWhere this page’s facts came from. Open the receipts.
- 1GitHub - plausible/analytics repo
- 2GitHub API - repo metadata (stars, language, activity)
- 3GitHub - recently merged PRs
- 4Plausible LICENSE (AGPL-3.0)
- 5Plausible homepage + pricing (Starter $9, Growth $14, Business $19)
- 6Plausible self-hosted Community Edition (cloud vs CE differences)
- 7Plausible about page (bootstrapped, EU-based, subscriber-funded)
- 8GitHub Discussion #4285 - sampling gated to enterprise
- 9GitHub Discussion #6355 - CE unauthenticated RCE disclosure
- 10Reddit r/selfhosted - Plausible open-core and feature gating
- 11Reddit r/degoogle - moving off Google Analytics in 2026
- 12Loopwerk - Self-hosting Plausible broke my analytics (bot filtering)
Watch it work
Real tutorials and reviews from YouTube, not ours.