Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics Review: Web Analytics That Respects Privacy by Design

Plausible was founded in 2019 by Uku Täht and Marko Saric with a simple premise: most website owners don't need the complexity of Google Analytics, and Google Analytics is increasingly difficult to deploy compliantly in a privacy-conscious world. Plausible's response — elegant simplicity, European hosting, no cookies — has resonated strongly with developers and content publishers who want actionable web data without the compliance overhead.

Architecture as Compliance

Plausible's most important feature is not a feature at all — it is an architecture decision. Because Plausible does not use cookies and does not track individual users across sessions, it does not require GDPR cookie consent under EU law. The ICO and European privacy regulators have consistently held that analytics tools that do not process personal data in the legal sense do not require consent banners.

This means a website running Plausible can remove its cookie consent banner entirely for analytics purposes, which typically increases measured traffic by 10–40% (users who previously rejected analytics cookies begin contributing to the data). For sites where consent banner rejection is a significant source of underreporting, Plausible produces more accurate audience data than cookie-based tools.

Performance

Plausible's tracking script is 1.0KB. The Google Analytics 4 script (gtag.js + the GA4 payload) loads 45KB or more. On mobile connections, this difference is measurable in Core Web Vitals scores. For teams that have worked to optimise their Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time, adding GA4 can noticeably degrade those scores. Plausible adds no measurable performance impact.

The Dashboard

Plausible's dashboard is a single-page overview showing: unique visitors, total pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, top pages, top sources (referrers, UTM sources, channels), countries, and device types. Everything is on one screen. There are no sub-reports to navigate, no custom dimension configuration, no analysis tool to learn.

This intentional simplicity is a genuine UX decision, not a limitation of engineering capacity. Plausible has deliberately not built funnels, cohorts, or session analysis, because adding them would complicate the interface for the primary user: a website owner who wants to answer "where is my traffic coming from and what are people reading?"

Goal Tracking and Events

Plausible does support basic goal tracking — pageview goals (tracking visits to specific pages) and custom event goals (triggered by JavaScript calls). This covers: tracking sign-up form submissions, purchase completions, outbound link clicks, and file downloads. What it does not support is multi-step funnels with drop-off analysis or cohort tracking of users through sequential events. For those use cases, Amplitude or Mixpanel are required.

Open Source and Self-Hosting

Plausible's codebase is open source and self-hostable on any server running Elixir and PostgreSQL. Self-hosting is free and removes the pageview-based pricing entirely. For high-traffic sites where $249/month+ plans become expensive, self-hosting on a $20/month VPS can be significantly cheaper. The self-hosted setup requires Docker familiarity and ongoing maintenance.

Verdict

Plausible is the right tool for content publishers, simple web businesses, and privacy-forward organisations that need clean traffic data without GDPR complexity. It is explicitly not a product analytics tool and does not try to be.

Score: 7.7/10 — Best simplicity and compliance story in the category; limited depth for product analytics or complex conversion tracking.