Plausible Analytics
Plausible Analytics is a lightweight, open-source, privacy-first web analytics platform. It provides a small JavaScript tracking snippet and a simple dashboard that surfaces core metrics (visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrals, goals) without cookies or user-level identifiers.
It can be used as a hosted SaaS or deployed on your own infrastructure via official self-hosting guides (Docker examples). Typical adopters are privacy-conscious websites, small-to-medium publishers, static/JAMstack sites and teams that want clear, actionable metrics without the complexity or privacy risk of large analytics vendors.
Use Cases
- Small-to-medium websites and blogs that need lightweight, fast analytics with minimal performance impact.
- Publishers and content sites that want simple traffic and referral reporting without storing personal data.
- Privacy-focused organizations that must limit personal data collection for GDPR/CCPA compliance and prefer to keep analytics on their own infrastructure.
- Static sites and JAMstack projects where small script size and low bandwidth are priorities.
- Marketing teams that need UTM/campaign attribution and basic conversion goals without full session-level analytics.
- Teams deciding between a managed privacy-friendly SaaS (no-ops) or a self-hosted deployment to retain data control.
Strengths
- Privacy-first data model: Collects aggregated, non-personal metrics with no cookies and no cross-site tracking — lowers compliance overhead.
- Open source: Public codebase enables auditing, modification, and self-hosting.
- Self-hosting option: Official documentation and Docker examples let organizations keep analytics on their infrastructure.
- Hosted service available: Managed SaaS option for teams that don’t want operational burden.
- Tiny tracking script: Smaller footprint than major analytics vendors, improving page speed and reducing bandwidth.
- Simple dashboard: Focused, single-page UI that surfaces core metrics for quick interpretation.
- Goals, events, UTM attribution: Supports basic conversion tracking and campaign measurement without user-level tracking.
- Integrations and API: WordPress plugin, community integrations and a simple API for exporting aggregated metrics.
- Documentation and community: Solid docs and active community resources to support self-hosting and troubleshooting.
Limitations
- Not enterprise-grade analytics: No session replays, no user-level segmentation, and limited funnel/attribution capabilities by design.
- Self-hosting requires ops: You must run containers, manage backups, updates, monitoring and capacity planning if you self-host.
- Can be resource-intensive at scale: Production self-hosted setups may need CPU, memory and I/O tuning for high-traffic sites.
- Fewer out-of-the-box integrations: Compared to large vendors, official integrations are limited and some connections require custom work.
- Aggregated model limits analysis: Cross-device and returning-user analyses that require user identifiers aren’t possible.
Final Thoughts
Plausible is a pragmatic choice when your priority is privacy, simplicity and low performance overhead. It fits well for content sites, static sites and privacy-sensitive organizations that need clear, aggregated metrics and optionally want to host analytics data themselves.
Choose the hosted plan if you want a no-ops, privacy-friendly analytics service. Choose self-hosting when you need full data control or must meet strict compliance requirements — but plan for operational costs: provisioning, backups, updates and monitoring. If your product needs granular user journeys, multi-touch attribution or enterprise reporting, Plausible is not the right fit.