Counter vs Plausible Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentCounter compared with Plausible Analytics
Plausible is what Counter would be if it were a real business: the same cookieless philosophy and one-page simplicity, but with goals, funnels, revenue attribution, an API, team seats, a bootstrapped-profitable company, and prices from $9 a month. Counter is free and tiny. Use Counter on a personal site; move to Plausible the moment someone other than you needs to read the numbers.
Choose Counter if
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Choose Plausible Analytics if
Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Counter | Plausible Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (pay what you want) | $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. | Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top. |
| Free plan | The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. | No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely | 30 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription. | Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics. |
| Setup time | Under five minutes. Create an account, paste a one-kilobyte script, and the numbers start appearing. There is nothing else to configure. | Minutes: add one script tag or the WordPress plugin and data flows immediately; goals take a few more minutes each, and a GA history import runs in the background. |
| Learning curve | None. The dashboard has four sections and no report builder, which is the entire design intent. | Near zero for the dashboard; funnels and the Stats API are the only features that need documentation time. |
| Platforms | Web app (German-hosted), Self-hosted (Go binary plus Redis), JavaScript tracking script | Web app (cloud, EU-hosted), Self-hosted Community Edition (Docker, open source), WordPress plugin |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required) | GDPR, ePrivacy/PECR, CCPA (no personal data sold or collected) |
| Founded | 2020 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Berlin, Germany | Remote; legal entity Plausible Insights OU, registered in Tartu, Estonia |
| Ownership | Independent single-developer project, funded by voluntary user payments | Bootstrapped; independent, no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Counter
Strengths
- The most conservative privacy architecture in this category: no cookies, no fingerprinting, no persistent identifier in browser storage, and no IP processing in the application backend.
- A tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, which is among the smallest in existence and effectively free in page weight terms.
- No consent banner required, with less to explain to a data protection officer than any competitor because there is less data being handled.
- AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from a Go binary plus Redis, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service.
Limitations
- The hosted service is run by one developer with no SLA and no support commitment, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025, which is a real continuity risk.
- No events, goals, funnels, or conversion reporting at all, so it cannot answer whether a campaign produced signups.
- No meaningful API, warehouse export, or BI connectors, so the data cannot feed anything else you run.
- No teams, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards, which rules it out for agency use entirely.
Plausible Analytics
Strengths
- Genuinely lightweight and simple: a sub-1KB script and a one-page dashboard that non-analysts read correctly on first contact.
- The cleanest privacy story in the category: cookie-free, no personal data, EU-owned hosting, Estonian entity, and open-source code backing every claim.
- Bootstrapped, profitable, and 21,000+ subscribers strong, so there is no acquisition-or-shutdown risk of the usual VC variety.
- Business-plan funnels, user journeys, and ecommerce revenue attribution push it past bare pageview counting into real marketing measurement.
Limitations
- No user-level analytics by design: no sessions per user, no retention cohorts, no replay, and funnels are aggregate only, so product analytics questions are out of scope.
- Attribution stops at the website: revenue attribution covers on-site ecommerce events, not CRM pipeline, offline conversions, or ad-platform sync.
- Daily-rotating visitor hashing means returning-visitor and multi-day journey measurement is structurally limited compared to cookie-based tools.
- Key features (funnels, revenue, API) are gated to the Business plan, making the effective entry price for marketing teams $19+ rather than $9.
Pricing compared
Counter
Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.
- Hosted (pay what you want)$0
- Self-hosted$0
At a price of zero with an honest request attached, the value question is not really about money, it is about risk and scope. What you get is a fast, tiny, genuinely private visitor counter that answers two questions well and asks nothing of you. What you do not get is events, goals, funnels, an API, teams, or any commitment that the service will exist next year. For a personal site that is an excellent trade and the right thing to do is pay something. For a business, the six to twenty dollars a month that Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom charge buys continuity, support, and a feature set that grows with you, and that is money well spent rather than money saved.
Plausible Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top.
- StarterFrom $9
- GrowthFrom $14
- BusinessFrom $19
- EnterpriseCustom
For pure web analytics, Plausible's pricing is honest and low: a typical small SaaS site pays less per month than a single GA4 consultant hour, and the Business tier at $19+ undercuts most attribution-lite competitors while including funnels and revenue tracking. The catch is scaling: because price tracks pageviews, high-traffic publishers should model their real slider price before assuming Plausible stays cheap, and anyone needing user-level analysis is buying the wrong tool at any price.
Editorial verdict on each
Counter
Counter is the most likeable product in this category and the one you should be most careful about depending on. The privacy engineering is genuinely the strictest here, refusing even to process IP addresses in the backend, the script is a kilobyte, no consent banner is needed, and the whole thing is free with a polite request attached. For a personal blog, an open-source docs site, or a portfolio, it is the right tool and you should pay the developer something. For anything commercial, the absence of events, goals, an API, teams, and any service commitment is disqualifying, and the fact that the domain lapsed once in 2025 is not a detail to gloss over. If you like the philosophy but need reliability, Simple Analytics is free and more capable, Pirsch is six dollars and far deeper, and Umami is the open-source version to self-host instead.
Read the full Counter profilePlausible Analytics
Plausible is the best-reasoned product in the privacy-first analytics niche: every limitation traces back to a principled refusal to collect personal data, and what remains is a fast, honest, inexpensive dashboard that most marketing teams will actually read. The Business plan's funnels and revenue attribution cover more measurement ground than its minimalist reputation suggests, and the bootstrapped, open-source structure removes whole categories of vendor risk. Just be clear about the boundary: this is website analytics done extremely well, and nothing beyond it, so product analytics and B2B pipeline attribution belong to different tools.
Read the full Plausible Analytics profileCounter profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Plausible Analytics last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Counter and Plausible Analytics?
Plausible is what Counter would be if it were a real business: the same cookieless philosophy and one-page simplicity, but with goals, funnels, revenue attribution, an API, team seats, a bootstrapped-profitable company, and prices from $9 a month. Counter is free and tiny. Use Counter on a personal site; move to Plausible the moment someone other than you needs to read the numbers.
Is Counter or Plausible Analytics cheaper?
Counter starts at $0 (pay what you want). Plausible Analytics starts at $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Counter pricing model: Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. Plausible Analytics pricing model: Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top.
Does Counter or Plausible Analytics have a free plan?
Counter has a free plan. The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. Trial terms: Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely. Plausible Analytics has a free plan. No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. Trial terms: 30 days, no credit card required.
Who should choose Counter?
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Who should choose Plausible Analytics?
Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics.
What are the best alternatives to Counter and Plausible Analytics?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), Umami (Best Value), HockeyStack (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
