Plausible Analytics

What Plausible does

Plausible is a web analytics tool built around a single dashboard: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, sources, pages, locations and devices all sit on one screen. It is aimed at site owners, publishers and small teams who want to know where traffic comes from and which pages convert, rather than at product teams studying individual user journeys.

Goals and custom events cover most conversion tracking. Common events such as outbound link clicks, file downloads and form submissions can be switched on without writing tracking code, and UTM campaigns are reported automatically.

Privacy and cookies

Plausible does not set cookies or use browser storage. To count unique visitors it hashes the IP address and user agent together with the site’s domain and a salt that is replaced every 24 hours, so the same person cannot be followed from one day to the next and raw IP addresses are not stored. The project states that sites using it do not need a consent banner for analytics. Whether that holds for your site still depends on the law that applies to you and on everything else the site loads; see our guide to choosing web analytics software.

The tracking script is 2.5 KB according to the official site, which keeps its effect on page speed small.

Self-hosting Plausible

The self-hosted version is called Plausible Community Edition and is installed with Docker Compose. It runs an Elixir application with PostgreSQL for settings and ClickHouse for the event data. The documentation recommends at least 2 GB of RAM, and ClickHouse needs a processor with SSE 4.2 or NEON support, which rules out some older or very small servers.

Community Edition is released about twice a year, so new features arrive later than on the hosted service. It does not include the premium features: funnels, ecommerce revenue goals, single sign-on, the Sites API and the Looker Studio connector. Support comes from the community rather than the company. Because the data sits in your own ClickHouse database, you can query it directly.

Hosted version

Plausible Insights runs the hosted service on infrastructure owned by EU companies, with data stored in Germany. The project says the subscription is its only source of funding, and the repository does not mention a free plan.

Limitations

Plausible reports on aggregate traffic. It has no session recordings, heatmaps or per-user profiles, so it does not replace product analytics tools such as Mixpanel or behavior tools such as Hotjar. If you self-host, the twice-yearly release cycle and the missing premium features are the main trade-offs.

Who it suits

Plausible fits blogs, documentation sites, marketing sites and small online shops that want clear traffic and conversion figures without cookies. Teams that already run Docker can self-host it cheaply; others can use the hosted service and still keep the option to move to their own server later.