Plausible Analytics
Lightweight, cookie-free audience measurement, hosted in the European Union; open code and self-hostable. From $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews, 30-day trial.
Counting pageviews without cookies, with referrers, countries and devices, is a small project: a few-line script, a table and a dashboard. What you lose: filtering of bots and junk traffic, goals and funnels, Search Console integration and the peace of mind of a managed service. For a small site, replaceable, or simply install Plausible or Umami on your server.
What you lose
- Filtering of bots and junk traffic
- Goals and conversion funnels
- Search Console integration
- Managed European hosting
Existing alternatives to Plausible Analytics
- UmamiOpen source
Free audience measurement (MIT), cookie-free, self-hostable, with a simple dashboard.
- Plausible auto-hébergéOpen source
The same product in a free community edition (AGPL-3.0), to install on your own server.
- MatomoOpen source
Full self-hostable web analytics (GPL-3.0), an alternative to Google Analytics.
The prompt to build it yourself
Build me a cookie-free audience measurement for my sites, to replace Plausible. Stack: Node, Express, SQLite (better-sqlite3), a script of about 1 KB to include in my pages, a dashboard on my server. To do: - The script sends the page viewed, the referrer and the screen width through a POST endpoint; no cookie, no local storage, no persistent identifier. - The visitor is counted anonymously with a daily fingerprint (salted hash, salt renewed every day); neither the IP address nor the full user agent is kept. - Country inferred from the IP address by a local database (then the address is forgotten), browser and device inferred from the user agent. - Basic bot filtering (list of known agents, requests with no plausible referrer). - Dashboard: visitors and pageviews per day, top pages, referrers, countries, devices, simple goals (target page reached). - Several sites on the same installation; dashboard protected by password; CSV export. - Configurable retention period; tests on counting and filtering. Out of scope: funnels, Search Console integration, per-device measurement across several days. README: installation, including the script, explaining what is collected, and a reminder that Plausible or Umami also self-host.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Plausible Analytics be replaced by a custom-built tool?
- casevibecode verdict: Partly replaceable. Counting pageviews without cookies, with referrers, countries and devices, is a small project: a few-line script, a table and a dashboard. What you lose: filtering of bots and junk traffic, goals and funnels, Search Console integration and the peace of mind of a managed service. For a small site, replaceable, or simply install Plausible or Umami on your server.
- What is Plausible Analytics used for?
- Lightweight, cookie-free audience measurement, hosted in the European Union; open code and self-hostable. From $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews, 30-day trial.
- What alternatives to Plausible Analytics already exist?
- Umami (open source), Plausible auto-hébergé (open source), Matomo (open source). Options to compare before committing to a custom build.
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