Plausible: Privacy focused Google Analytics alternative

Even though the purpose of Plausible Analytics is to track the usage of a website, this can still be done without collecting any personal data or personally identifiable information (PII), without using cookies and while respecting the privacy of your website visitors.

By using Plausible Analytics, all the site measurement is carried out absolutely anonymously. Cookies are not set and no personal data is collected. All data is in aggregate only. The website owner gets some actionable data to help them learn and improve, while the visitor keeps having a nice and enjoyable experience.

Here’s a look at what makes Plausible Analytics a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.

1. It’s an open source web analytics software
2. Hosted in the EU powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure
3. Completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped
4. We minimize data collection
5. No personal data is collected
6. All data is in aggregate only
7. No tracking across devices
8. No tracking across websites and apps
9. All data is isolated to a single day
10. No cookies and other persistent identifiers
11. You 100% own your website data
12. Your data is not sent to, shared with or sold to any third-parties
13. We have nothing to do with surveillance capitalism
14. You can open up your stats and share them with your visitors
15. You can self-host Plausible Analytics
16. Sounds like an interesting alternative to you?

It’s an open source web analytics software

Plausible Analytics is open source software. Our source code is available and accessible on GitHub.

We are not a black box. Everything is in the open. Anyone can view, review and inspect the code we’re running to verify that we practice what we preach.

This is essential in the market of privacy software. Corporations and proprietary software cannot always be trusted when data is in question. The only way to prove your trust is to allow experts to look into your code and verify that you’re actually doing what you’re saying you’re doing.

Hosted in the EU powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure

We’re a small team and we’re based in the EU. The legal entity is incorporated in Estonia.

All of the data that we do track and collect is kept fully secured, encrypted and hosted on renewable energy powered server in Falkenstein, Germany. The server is owned by Hetzner, a European company. This ensures that all of the website data is being covered by the European Union’s strict laws on data privacy.

We use Bunny (another European-owned provider from Slovenia) for a global CDN, DNS and DDoS protection. This ensures that all visitor data we collect is exclusively processed with servers owned and operated by European companies.

You don’t have to worry about Schrems II and that it invalidates the EU-US Privacy Shield. Your website data never leaves the EU.

Completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped

There are no investors behind Plausible Analytics and no big corporations with a different agenda or big plans. We are not interested in raising funds or taking investment. Not from individuals, not from institutions and not from venture capitalists. We ignore all such requests. We’re solely funded by our subscribers.

We minimize data collection

We minimize data collection in general. We measure only the most essential data points and nothing else.

Other analytics tools such as the market leader Google Analytics collect and provide hundreds of different reports with hundreds of different metrics. This vast data collection is unnecessary, it is violating the privacy of web users and it is overkill for most website owners.

All the metrics we do collect fit on one single page. The benefits of minimizing data collection go beyond privacy. Plausible Analytics is much easier and simpler to use and understand. It’s also 75 times lighter than Google Analytics so it doesn’t slow down your site and reduces your carbon footprint.

You can view all the data we collect in our live demo dashboard. It features our own website stats.

No personal data is collected

We do not track, collect nor store any personal data or personally identifiable information. You can explore all the data points we do collect in our data policy.

Plausible Analytics is even more privacy friendly than options such as server logs. In server logs, you can see all the IP addresses of your visitors and details about when they visited your site while there is no way to get any kind of personal data from Plausible Analytics.

You can read our full comparison with server logs.

All data is in aggregate only

The goal of Plausible Analytics is to track overall trends in your website traffic, it is not to track individual visitors. The privacy of your website visitors is important to us so we do not track any individual people. All the data is in aggregate only.

No tracking across devices

We do not track people across their devices. All the data is isolated to a single device only. There is no way to know whether the same person visits a site from more than one device.

No tracking across websites and apps

We do not track people across websites and apps that they visit. All the data is isolated to a single website only. There is no way to know what other websites someone visits.

All data is isolated to a single day

All the data is isolated to a single day only. There is no way to know whether the same person comes back to a site on another day.

No cookies and other persistent identifiers

We do not use cookies whatsoever.

We do not generate any persistent identifiers either. We generate a random string of letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitors on a website and we reset this string once per day.

This makes us compliant with the different cookie laws and privacy regulations such as GDPR and PECR.

Here’s an independent legal assessment on GDPR-compliant web analytics without consent written by an experienced data protection expert and lawyer.

By not using cookies you do not need to obtain consent from the visitors to store and retrieve data from their devices. It’s one less thing to worry about and annoy your visitors with.

You 100% own your website data

When using Plausible Analytics, you 100% own and control all of your website data. Although when using our hosted service, your site analytics are stored on our server in the cloud, you remain completely in control of your site data and you fully own all of your data too.

You can delete everything that we have collected about your site any time that you want.

Your data is not sent to, shared with or sold to any third-parties

We do not share, sell or send your website data to any advertising companies or any other third-parties in general. Your website data is not monetized, mined and harvested for personal and behavioral trends. That is not our business model.

We have nothing to do with surveillance capitalism

Our business model has nothing to do with collecting and analyzing huge amounts of personal information from web users and using these behavioral insights to sell advertisements. We choose the subscription business model rather than the business model of surveillance capitalism.

Plausible Analytics is funded by our community of people that use and enjoy our product. Since we don’t make money from advertising, by selling your data or by abusing the privacy of your visitors, we need to charge a fee.

Revenue from our paid subscribers helps keep the project development going, helps us cover our costs, stay in business, helps us to continue putting time and effort into improving the project.

You can open up your stats and share them with your visitors

We have an in-built feature that we recommend all website owners use to open up their stats to the public. Then you can share your stats on your site to be fully transparent so your visitors and anyone else can view the data that you yourself have access to.

Many of sites using Plausible have chosen to do so. Then they share a link to their public stats dashboard in their footer, in their privacy policy or on their about page. You can even embed our dashboard into your site.

You can self-host Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is open source and you can self-host it on your own server.

The main difference between Plausible Analytics in the cloud and the self-hosted version is that the self-hosted version you need to install, maintain and manage on your own server while the cloud version we manage for you so you don’t have to worry about anything. You can see all the differences here.

Sounds like an interesting alternative to you?

If this sounds interesting to you, you can try out Plausible Analytics on your website. We have a completely free 30-day trial. No credit card is required. You can start your free trial here.

As we’re very lightweight, you can even run Plausible alongside your current analytics provider, test things and only remove the other script after you’re completely happy with what Plausible provides. Enjoy!