Plausible Analytics vs Simple 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.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in GTM Analytics for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentSimple Analytics compared with Plausible Analytics
The two closest competitors in EU privacy-first analytics. Plausible is open source with an inspectable codebase, bundles three to ten team members, and gates funnels, user journeys, and revenue attribution behind its €19-plus Business plan. Simple Analytics has a free forever tier and an AI assistant, but charges €20 per extra seat. Solo operators and small sites lean Simple Analytics; marketing teams that need funnels and several logins lean Plausible.
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.
Choose Simple Analytics if
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Plausible Analytics | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available) | $0 (free forever), then €20 per month |
| 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. | Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier. |
| Free plan | No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. | Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. |
| Free trial | 30 days, no credit card required | 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required |
| Best for | 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. | European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding. |
| Setup time | 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. | Under ten minutes: paste one script, install the WordPress plugin, or deploy through Google Tag Manager, and data appears immediately. Proxying through your own domain for blocker resilience takes an extra half hour of DNS and routing work. |
| Learning curve | Near zero for the dashboard; funnels and the Stats API are the only features that need documentation time. | Effectively none for the dashboard, which is the entire design goal. Events, the export API, and the BI connectors are the only pieces that need documentation time. |
| Platforms | Web app (cloud, EU-hosted), Self-hosted Community Edition (Docker, open source), WordPress plugin | Web app (EU-hosted cloud), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio connector, Power BI connector |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy/PECR, CCPA (no personal data sold or collected) | GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and PECR, CCPA, CNIL and DSGVO alignment, SOC 2 in progress |
| Founded | 2018 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Remote; legal entity Plausible Insights OU, registered in Tartu, Estonia | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; independent, no outside investors | Bootstrapped; 100 percent owned by its founders with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Simple Analytics
Strengths
- A free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use and five websites, which no other serious privacy-first tool matches on volume.
- Paid pricing starts at €20 a month for 100,000 pageviews and 10 websites, with no overage surprises inside a band.
- The strongest privacy architecture claims in the group: no cookies, no browser storage, no IP storage, no visitor IDs, EU hosting under a Dutch entity.
- The traffic recovery positioning is commercially honest, acknowledging that most businesses will keep GA4 and selling a complement rather than pretending a replacement is realistic.
Limitations
- Per-seat pricing at €20 per additional user is expensive relative to competitors that bundle three to ten team members into the base price.
- The free plan's 30-day history window means trend analysis and year-over-year comparison are impossible without paying, unlike free tiers that limit volume instead.
- SOC 2 is described as in progress rather than complete, which will stall some procurement reviews that a competitor with a finished report would pass.
- SSO, role-based access, and raw data access sit behind a demo-gated Enterprise tier, so the self-serve product has a hard ceiling for larger teams.
Pricing compared
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.
Simple Analytics
Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
- Free€0
- Simple€20
- EnterpriseCustom
The free plan is the most useful free offer in privacy-first analytics because it does not meter your traffic, and for a small site the 30-day history limit is genuinely liveable for months. The €20 paid plan (100,000 pageviews, 10 websites, 3 years of history) is priced close to Plausible and Fathom at the same volume. The value breaks down on teams: at €20 per extra seat, a marketing department of five costs €100 a month for a tool whose competitors bundle ten users, so this is best value as a one-person or two-person purchase and worst value as a departmental one.
Editorial verdict on each
Plausible 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 profileSimple Analytics
Simple Analytics is the most sensible starting point in privacy-first analytics for a one-person or two-person business, because the free plan gives you unlimited traffic on five sites and only asks for money when you want history back. The €20 paid plan buys three years of history on 10 websites, the AI assistant is a better interface than any report builder for non-analysts, and the Dutch EU-only architecture is the cleanest answer available to a European privacy review. Two things to check before buying: seats cost €20 each, which makes it a poor fit for a marketing department of five, and SOC 2 is still in progress. The traffic recovery pitch is the most honest thing any vendor in this category says out loud, which is that you are probably not deleting GA4, so buy the tool that gives you the numbers you can actually trust while Google keeps feeding your ads.
Read the full Simple Analytics profilePlausible Analytics profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Simple Analytics last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
The best in GTM Analytics
16 trackedGTM analytics tools measure how go-to-market actually performs: where traffic and pipeline come from, what marketing touches contribute revenue, and what users do once they arrive.
Two decades of ubiquity, free at any traffic volume, and ad platform integrations no rival matches make Google Analytics the category's inescapable standard.
Self hosted Umami delivers funnels, retention, journeys, revenue, and a full API for the price of a VPS, with a free 100,000 event Cloud tier besides.
Founded in 2022, through Y Combinator in 2023, and a $20M Bessemer Series A by January 2025, HockeyStack is the breakout name in B2B revenue attribution.
The Triple Pixel plus Compass, unifying multi touch attribution, marketing mix modelling, and incrementality in one system, is a genuinely new measurement mechanism.
One script tag puts data live immediately and the whole product is a single dashboard page, the shortest route from signup to a real answer in the category.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Plausible Analytics and Simple Analytics?
The two closest competitors in EU privacy-first analytics. Plausible is open source with an inspectable codebase, bundles three to ten team members, and gates funnels, user journeys, and revenue attribution behind its €19-plus Business plan. Simple Analytics has a free forever tier and an AI assistant, but charges €20 per extra seat. Solo operators and small sites lean Simple Analytics; marketing teams that need funnels and several logins lean Plausible.
Is Plausible Analytics or Simple Analytics cheaper?
Plausible Analytics starts at $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available). Simple Analytics starts at $0 (free forever), then €20 per month. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole 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. Simple Analytics pricing model: Freemium with a free forever plan, one self-serve paid plan priced in pageview bands via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
Does Plausible Analytics or Simple Analytics have a free plan?
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. Simple Analytics has a free plan. Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. Trial terms: 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required.
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.
Who should choose Simple Analytics?
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
What are the best alternatives to Plausible Analytics and Simple 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.
