Plausible Analytics

Analytics That Fits on One Screen

Plausible launched in 2019 with a clear thesis: most people do not need Google Analytics, they need to know how many visitors they got, where from, and what they read. The entire product is one dashboard. No menus to get lost in, no Explore section, no twenty-minute report builds. It is refreshing.

Privacy as the Core Product

Plausible does not use cookies and does not collect personal data. Because of that, in most of the EU you can run it without a cookie consent banner at all. It is open source, the company is based in the EU, and all data is stored in the EU. For a Spanish business that just wants honest traffic numbers without a legal headache, this is close to ideal.

Tiny Script, Fast Pages

The Plausible tracking script is under 1 KB. The GA4 script is roughly 45 KB. On a site where page speed and Core Web Vitals matter, that difference is real. I have swapped GA4 for Plausible on a content site and watched the performance score climb without doing anything else.

What You Get and What You Don't

You get visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, top sources, top pages, countries, devices, and goal conversions, plus UTM campaign tracking and a simple funnel feature. What you do not get is GA4-style custom segmentation, user-level analysis, or BigQuery export. Plausible is deliberately not trying to be a data platform.

The Pricing Reality

There is no free tier beyond a 30-day trial; the cloud version is a paid subscription based on monthly pageviews, starting cheap for small sites. You can also self-host the open-source version for free if you would rather run it yourself. Either way, it is inexpensive compared with most paid analytics.