Plausible Analytics

Name: Plausible Analytics
Brand: Plausible Analytics
Price: 910 USD

Cookie-free EU web analytics from a bootstrapped team of ten

Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, open-source, cookie-free web analytics tool made and hosted in the EU, giving site owners a single-page dashboard of traffic, sources, goals, funnels, and ecommerce revenue without personal-data collection or consent banners, as a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics.

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Overview

Plausible is the archetypal anti-Google-Analytics product: one clean dashboard, a tracking script it claims is 54 times smaller than GA's, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no personal data profiles, which is how it argues that EU sites can run it without cookie banners or GDPR consent prompts. The code is open source, the company is Estonian (Plausible Insights OU), and all customer data is processed and stored on EU-owned infrastructure, a stance it markets explicitly to buyers burned by Schrems II-era transfers to US providers.

The product has grown past bare pageview counting. Goals and custom events cover conversions, the Business plan adds funnels, user journeys, and ecommerce revenue attribution, and a Stats API (600 requests per hour) supports custom reporting. Team management, shared links, and embeddable dashboards handle the agency and stakeholder cases. What it deliberately does not do is individual-level analysis: there are no user profiles, no session replay, no retention cohorts, which is the price of its privacy posture.

Commercially, Plausible is one of the more admirable stories in indie SaaS: started by Uku Taht in December 2018, joined by Marko Saric in 2020, bootstrapped with no outside investors, past $1M ARR in 2022, and now a team of about 10 serving 20,000+ paying subscribers including Basecamp, Ghost, Hugging Face, MongoDB, and Harvard. For buyers, that structure cuts both ways: no VC-driven pivots or acquisition risk in the usual sense, but also a ten-person roadmap that will never sprint after enterprise feature checklists.

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.

Not the right fit for

Product teams needing funnels over in-app behavior, retention cohorts, session replay, or feature flags; Plausible measures websites, not products, and PostHog-class tools own that job.
B2B marketers who need pipeline and revenue attribution against a CRM; Plausible's revenue attribution stops at ecommerce event values on the site itself.
Ad-heavy performance marketing teams that live on remarketing audiences and ad-platform conversion syncing; Plausible deliberately refuses the cross-site tracking that workflow depends on.
Enterprises expecting SSO, contractual SLAs, and compliance paperwork by default; SSO and managed options only appear on the custom Enterprise tier of a ten-person company.
Anyone wanting per-user data exploration or raw event access on standard plans; aggregate reporting is the product's philosophical boundary.

How it works

1
You add a script tag of roughly a kilobyte to your site (or use the WordPress plugin, or proxy the script through your own domain), and traffic starts appearing on a single-page dashboard within minutes: visitors, pageviews, top pages, sources, UTM campaigns, devices, browsers, and countries, all in real time.
2
Instead of cookies or persistent identifiers, Plausible counts visitors by generating a daily-rotating hash from incoming request data, so no personal data is stored and visitors cannot be tracked across days or across sites. That is the technical basis for its no-consent-banner claim, and the reason it cannot offer user-level journeys or long-term visitor histories.
3
Conversions are tracked through goals: pageview goals, custom events, and outbound-link or file-download tracking, with codeless setup for common cases. On the Business plan those goals compose into funnels and user-journey views, and ecommerce revenue can be attached to events so campaigns and referrers get revenue numbers, Plausible's answer to attribution at the marketing-site level.
4
Sharing works through public or password-protected dashboard links, embedded dashboards, and scheduled email or Slack reports; programmatic access runs through the Stats API. Self-hosters can run the open-source Community Edition on their own servers for free, trading Plausible's managed infrastructure and some cloud-only features for full control.

Feature breakdown

25 features in 5 modules

Core dashboard and metrics

Everything on one page, updating in real time, readable without training.

Single-page dashboard: Visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, top pages, sources, and geography in one view, with click-to-filter segmentation on every element.
Lightweight script: The tracking snippet is under 1KB, which Plausible markets as 54 times smaller than the Google Analytics tag, with a measurable page-speed benefit.
Real-time reporting: Stats appear with seconds of delay, including a current-visitors counter.
UTM and campaign tracking: Full breakdowns by source, medium, campaign, term, and content parameters for measuring newsletters, ads, and social pushes.
Bot and spam filtering: Known bots, crawlers, and referrer spam are excluded automatically from counts.
Google Search Console integration: Search keyword data can be pulled into the dashboard by linking a Search Console property.

Conversions and revenue

Goal tracking that reaches up to funnels and ecommerce revenue on the Business plan.

Goals and custom events: Pageview goals and custom events (button clicks, signups, downloads) with codeless setup options and conversion-rate reporting per source, page, and campaign.
Funnels: Multi-step conversion funnels built from goals show drop-off between steps; a Business-plan feature.
User journeys: Aggregate path analysis showing how visitors move between pages and entry points, without individual-level tracking; Business plan.
Ecommerce revenue attribution: Monetary values attached to conversion events roll up into revenue by campaign, source, and page, giving marketing-site-level ROI numbers; Business plan.
Outbound link and download tracking: Clicks to external links and file downloads can be tracked as events without custom code.

Privacy and compliance architecture

The design decisions that let Plausible claim compliance without consent banners.

Cookie-free counting: Visitors are counted via a daily-rotating hash rather than cookies or fingerprinting-style persistent IDs, so no consent prompt is required under GDPR and ePrivacy in Plausible's legal reading.
No personal data collection: All reporting is aggregate; no individual profiles, no cross-site or cross-device tracking, no data sold or shared with advertisers.
EU-owned hosting: Data is processed and stored in the EU on European-owned infrastructure, with the company itself registered in Estonia, avoiding US transfer questions entirely.
Open-source codebase: The full analytics engine is public on GitHub (AGPL-licensed), so the privacy claims are inspectable rather than taken on faith.
Proxy support: The script can be served through the customer's own domain, keeping measurement first-party and resilient to blocklists; a managed proxy is part of the Enterprise tier.

Teams, sharing, and reporting

How stats get to stakeholders who will never log in.

Team members and roles: Up to 3 team members on Growth and 10 on Business, with more on Enterprise.
Shared and embedded dashboards: Public or password-protected dashboard links and embeddable views for clients and stakeholders; Plausible runs its own live dashboard publicly as a demo.
Email and Slack reports: Scheduled weekly or monthly summaries delivered to email or Slack channels.
Multi-site management: 1 site on Starter, up to 3 on Growth, 10 on Business, and 10+ on Enterprise, under one subscription and login.

Data access and portability

Getting numbers out, and getting history in.

Stats API: A read API at 600 requests per hour on Business (higher on Enterprise) for custom dashboards and internal reporting.
Google Analytics import: Historical GA data can be imported so switching does not orphan past traffic history.
CSV export: Any dashboard view exports to CSV; raw data exports are an Enterprise item.
Self-hosted Community Edition: The open-source version can be run on your own infrastructure for free, without the managed service's uptime, upgrades, or some cloud features.
Data retention by plan: 3 years of stats history on Starter and Growth, 5 years on Business.

Use cases

4 documented

SaaS marketing lead replacing GA4

GA4's interface buries simple questions, legal keeps flagging US data transfers, and the cookie banner is depressing conversion on paid landing pages.

Plausible answers the daily questions (traffic, sources, campaign conversions) on one page, the consent banner disappears for analytics purposes, and the GA import preserves historical trendlines for year-over-year reporting.

Agency reporting to a dozen clients

Needs white-glove-free client reporting: live dashboards clients can open themselves without logins, training, or screenshots pasted into decks.

Shared password-protected dashboard links and scheduled email reports per site give every client self-serve numbers, with the 10-site Business plan (and Enterprise above it) keeping billing consolidated.

EU publisher under strict privacy review

The data protection officer wants analytics with no personal data processing, no US transfers, and auditable claims before approving anything.

Cookie-free aggregate counting, EU-owned hosting, an Estonian legal entity, and an open-source codebase give the DPO a defensible stack, without the consent-rate data loss that plagued the GA setup.

Bootstrapped ecommerce founder

Wants to know which campaigns and referrers actually produce revenue, not just sessions, without an analytics implementation project.

Revenue-tagged conversion events on the Business plan turn the sources report into a revenue report, enough attribution to steer spend for a store that does not need a data team.

Pricing

from $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews)

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Starter	From $9 per month at 10k pageviews; scales with traffic	1 site, 1 user Goals and custom events Email/Slack reports, 3 years retention
Growth	From $14 per month at 10k pageviews; scales with traffic	Up to 3 sites and 3 team members Team management and shared links Embedded dashboards The plan most solo businesses and small teams actually need.
Business	From $19 per month at 10k pageviews; scales with traffic	Up to 10 sites and 10 team members Funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue attribution Stats API (600 requests/hour), 5 years retention Funnels, revenue, and API access are gated here, so most marketing teams land on Business.
Enterprise	Custom annual, quoted	10+ sites and team members SSO, managed proxy, raw data exports Higher API limits

Billing notes

Published prices are the entry point at up to 10k monthly pageviews; the real price comes off a traffic slider, so a 1M-pageview site pays materially more than the headline number on the same plan.
Monthly and annual billing are both offered, with annual billing discounted (Plausible has long advertised roughly two months free on yearly plans); confirm the current slider price for your traffic band.
Feature gating matters more than traffic here: funnels, revenue attribution, and the API all require Business, so budget for the $19+ tier if attribution is the point.
Self-hosting the Community Edition is free but unsupported infrastructure work, and some cloud features do not ship in it.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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 20,000+ 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.
Google Analytics import plus CSV export and a Stats API keep data portable in both directions.
Transparent public pricing and a live public demo dashboard; you can see exactly what you are buying before the trial.

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.
A team of about 10 people ships deliberately; enterprise checklists (SSO, SLAs, raw exports) live only in a custom tier and the roadmap moves at indie pace.
Pageview-based pricing makes very high-traffic sites meaningfully more expensive than the headline prices suggest.

Head-to-head comparisons

3 alternatives

Plausible Analytics vs Fathom Analytics

from $15/mo (up to 100,000 pageviews)

Plausible and Fathom are the two flagship privacy-first GA alternatives and overlap heavily; Plausible is open source, EU-hosted, slightly cheaper at entry, and gates funnels and revenue behind its Business plan, while Fathom is closed source, includes 50 sites and forever data retention on every plan, and prices flat by traffic. Agencies with many small sites lean Fathom; open-source and EU-sovereignty buyers lean Plausible.

Full Plausible Analytics vs Fathom Analytics comparison

Plausible Analytics vs PostHog

from $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance)

Plausible measures your marketing site; PostHog measures your entire product with web analytics as a free side dish. If you need funnels over in-app behavior, replay, or experiments, Plausible cannot follow and PostHog's free tier is the obvious start; if you need simple, consent-banner-free traffic stats with nothing to maintain, Plausible is lighter, calmer, and easier to defend to a DPO.

Full Plausible Analytics vs PostHog comparison

Plausible Analytics vs Dreamdata

from Free plan at $0; paid plan is custom-quoted

Both pitch a GA alternative, but at different altitudes: Plausible reports site traffic and on-site conversions, while Dreamdata stitches web touches to CRM pipeline for account-level B2B attribution, with a free tier of its own. A B2B SaaS marketing team that lives in HubSpot or Salesforce should evaluate Dreamdata for attribution and may still keep Plausible as the lightweight public-site dashboard.

Full Plausible Analytics vs Dreamdata comparison

Implementation & onboarding

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.
Learning curve: Near zero for the dashboard; funnels and the Stats API are the only features that need documentation time.
Onboarding: Fully self-serve with a 30-day trial; no sales process below Enterprise.
Migration notes: The GA import brings historical data across so trendlines survive the switch; leaving later is equally clean via CSV export and the API. Expect visitor counts to differ from GA's, since cookie-free counting and bot filtering measure differently.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web app (cloud, EU-hosted)Self-hosted Community Edition (Docker, open source)WordPress plugin
API: Stats API for reading aggregate data, rate-limited at 600 requests/hour on Business with higher limits on Enterprise; events API for server-side event tracking.
Compliance: GDPRePrivacy/PECRCCPA (no personal data sold or collected)
Data residency: All data processed and stored in the EU on EU-owned infrastructure; company registered in Estonia.
SSO: SSO available on the Enterprise tier only.
Security notes: Open-source codebase (AGPL) makes data-handling claims auditable; no cookies or persistent identifiers are set, and subscription revenue is the company's only revenue, with no ad-tech relationships.

Support & resources

Channels: Email supportDocumentationGitHub issues for the open-source project
Documentation: Clear public docs covering setup, goals, proxying, and the API, plus an unusually substantive blog on privacy and analytics practice.
Community: Active GitHub community around the open-source project; no official user forum.

Company

Founded: 2018
Headquarters: Remote; legal entity Plausible Insights OU, registered in Tartu, Estonia
Ownership: Bootstrapped; independent, no outside investors
Founders: Uku Taht (founder), Marko Saric (co-founder, joined 2020)
Employees: ~10 (2026, per the company's own about page)
Funding: None; self-funded and profitable on subscription revenue alone, with a stated intent not to sell.

Timeline

2018Uku Taht starts building Plausible in December as a simple, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics.
2019Plausible Insights OU incorporated in Estonia; paid subscriptions launch.
2020Marko Saric joins as co-founder to lead marketing; the codebase is fully open-sourced.
2022Crosses $1M in annual recurring revenue, still bootstrapped with no outside capital.
2026A team of about 10 serves 20,000+ paying subscribers, including Basecamp, Ghost, Hugging Face, MongoDB, and Harvard University.

Integrations

WordPress (official plugin)
Google Search Console
Slack (scheduled reports)
Google Analytics (historical data import)
Stats API and events API for custom integrations
Community integrations for major frameworks (Next.js, Hugo, Ghost, and others)

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is Plausible Analytics?

Plausible is a lightweight, open-source web analytics tool that shows traffic, sources, conversions, funnels, and ecommerce revenue on a single-page dashboard without using cookies or collecting personal data. It is made and hosted in the EU and positions itself as a simpler, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics.

How much does Plausible cost?

Plans start at $9/month (Starter), $14/month (Growth), and $19/month (Business) at up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, with the price scaling up a traffic slider from there; a custom Enterprise tier sits above. There is a 30-day free trial, and annual billing is discounted.

Do I need a cookie consent banner with Plausible?

Plausible's position is no, for analytics purposes: it sets no cookies and collects no personal data, counting visitors with a daily-rotating hash instead. That removes the analytics justification for a consent banner under GDPR and ePrivacy, though other tools on your site (ads, embeds) may still require one.

Is Plausible really GDPR compliant without consent?

Its architecture avoids the triggers that require consent: no cookies, no persistent identifiers, no personal data storage, EU-only processing on EU-owned infrastructure, and an EU legal entity. The code is open source, so the claims are verifiable, but as with any tool, your own DPO signs off on your specific implementation.

Can Plausible replace Google Analytics?

For traffic reporting, campaign tracking, and conversion goals, yes, and it will do it with a fraction of the interface complexity and page weight; there is even a GA import so you keep historical data. It does not replace GA4's event-level exports to BigQuery, ads-ecosystem integration, or user-scoped analysis, because it refuses to collect that data in the first place.

Does Plausible do funnels and revenue attribution?

Yes, on the Business plan: multi-step funnels built from goals, aggregate user journeys, and ecommerce revenue attached to conversion events so campaigns and referrers report revenue, not just visits. It is site-level attribution; it does not connect to a CRM or attribute B2B pipeline.

Is Plausible open source, and can I self-host it?

The codebase is AGPL-licensed and public on GitHub, and a free Community Edition can be self-hosted with Docker. The hosted cloud service is what the company sells; self-hosting trades away managed infrastructure, automatic upgrades, and some cloud-only features.

How many sites and team members can I have?

Starter covers 1 site, Growth up to 3 sites and 3 team members, Business up to 10 sites and 10 team members, and Enterprise goes beyond that with custom limits. All sites share one subscription and dashboard login.

How accurate is Plausible compared to cookie-based analytics?

Expect different numbers, not worse ones: Plausible is not blocked as aggressively as Google's script and needs no consent (so it sees visitors GA loses), but daily-rotating hashing undercounts returning visitors across days. It is best treated as a consistent trend instrument rather than reconciled against GA line by line.

Who is behind Plausible?

Plausible Insights OU, an Estonian company started by Uku Taht in December 2018, with Marko Saric joining as co-founder in 2020. It is bootstrapped and profitable with no outside investors, a team of about 10, and more than 20,000 paying subscribers as of 2026.

Editorial verdict

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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.

Awards & badges

1 held

Plausible Analytics holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.

Best Value · GTM Analytics

“Cookie-free EU analytics from a bootstrapped team of ten, at $9 a month with nothing important held back.”

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