Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is an open source web analytics product from Plausible Insights OÜ, positioned as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It uses one lightweight script and a single-page dashboard, and does not use cookies or collect personal data. It is available as a managed cloud service hosted on EU-owned infrastructure and as a self-hosted Community Edition.

What It Is

Plausible is a website analytics tool for site owners who want traffic insights without building custom reports or running a consent banner. A tracking script (or the Events API) sends pageview and event data, and the dashboard shows sources, pages, locations, devices and goals in one view. The vendor states that it does not process personal data, use cookies or persistent identifiers, or do cross-site or cross-device tracking.

Analytics and Conversion Tracking

The dashboard supports filters, saved segments, period comparison, annotations, a real-time view and a consolidated view across sites. Goals can be pageview-based or custom events, with codeless tracking of outbound link clicks, file downloads, form submissions and 404 pages. Funnels, user journeys, custom properties and ecommerce revenue attribution are documented, as are scroll depth tracking and a channel view for traffic from AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Google Search Console integration shows search queries inside the dashboard, and Google Analytics stats can be imported.

Data Access and Sharing

Teams can use role-based access, shared links, embedded dashboards, and email or Slack reports with traffic spike notifications. A Stats API, Events API and Sites API allow programmatic access, and stats can be exported as CSV. A Data Studio connector and white-label embedding are also documented.

Cloud vs Self-Hosted

The cloud service is operated by Plausible, with data stored in Germany on EU-owned infrastructure. The Community Edition is released under AGPLv3, runs on your own server with ClickHouse and PostgreSQL, is released twice a year, and per the README omits premium features such as funnels, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API. The backend is built with Elixir and Phoenix and the frontend with React and TailwindCSS. The JavaScript tracker is MIT licensed.