Plausible Blog
plausible.io · Company blog · on HN since 2019
The Plausible blog covers the privacy-focused, open source web analytics product, its licensing, GDPR approach, and business growth.
What HN saysHN mainly links it as a recommended Google Analytics alternative; commenters say it works well, needs no cookies, and is GDPR-compliant, though self-hosting needs Postgres and Clickhouse.
215HN people shared it
179linked it in comments
66stories submitted
5.7Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner89 people · 167 points · first shared 2019 · 137 comments on HN
- 2Data policy14 people · first shared 2020
- 3Show HN: Plausible – Self-Hosted Google Analytics alternative9 people · 357 points · first shared 2020 · 139 comments on HN
- 4How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS8 people · 527 points · first shared 2022 · 106 comments on HN
- 5Plausible.io8 people · first shared 2020
- 6Why we’re changing to the AGPL license7 people · 290 points · first shared 2020 · 254 comments on HN
- 7Introduction7 people · first shared 2021
- 8Privacy focused web analytics7 people · first shared 2020
- 9How to pay your rent with your open source project4 people · 671 points · first shared 2020 · 289 comments on HN
- 10Web analytics, cookie law and can Google Analytics work without cookies?4 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Vs google analytics4 people · first shared 2020
- 12An alternative to using Google Analytics on your website3 people · 463 points · first shared 2020 · 301 comments on HN
- 13Plausible Community Edition3 people · 130 points · first shared 2024 · 103 comments on HN
- 14We bootstrapped our startup from $400 to $2,750 MRR in 135 days without ads3 people · 9 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Things I hate about GA43 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jiangplus · 2025-12-27
I have been using Plausible for a couple years, it works great and is opensource
https://plausible.io/
moooo99 · 2024-05-02
I think a single Google Analytics alternative is pretty hard to pick considering that GA can be used to very much varying extents.
For simple and "detailed enough" insights, I enjoyed using Plausible (https://plausible.io/) in the past.
For more in depth analytics that give you a detailed view into your own product, PostHog.com seems to be by far the best and most popular option out there.
deofoo · 2023-07-04
For those who look for an alternative https://plausible.io is a great replacement.
phartenfeller · 2023-07-04
I am using a self-hosted Plausible [1] instance, which is GDPR-compliant out of the box with no cookies required. I am super happy with it. The only downside is that you need to run Postgres and Clickhouse which is overkill for my small sites (an option that only uses SQLite would be great). I don't want to track my users. I just want to see which pages get traffic. Sometimes I am also curious about where visitors come from (by country) and what devices they are using.
In a newer update, they allow region tracking based on cities. I think this is too much information. I did not enable this and hope they won't add other more intrusive features.
[1] https://plausible.io/
smcn · 2023-05-24
https://plausible.io/
https://beamanalytics.io/
Have used both, currently using Beam. Would recommend either though!
tedivm · 2023-03-22
I think Plausible should also be mentioned as a great analytics alternative. It's open source with a paid saas option.
https://plausible.io/
alex_suzuki · 2023-03-14
I’m using Plausible (https://plausible.io) and it’s great, breath of fresh air compared to GA.
Kelteseth · 2023-02-16
Why don't they just use something like plausible for this? I switch to plausible for all my analytics and it works great.
https://plausible.io/
rapnie · 2023-02-13
I submitted separately [0] your blogpost "Open-source licensing and why Lago chose AGPLv3" [1]. I find this a refreshing and good read that counters the usual FUD so many people raise when hearing about the AGPL. In the article is mentioned Plausible [2] who also managed to create a great business this way, and in direct competition to Google Analytics. Well done.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773891
https://www.getlago.com/blog/open-source-licensing-and-why-lago-chose-…
https://plausible.io
ukutaht · 2022-02-10
Clickhouse has got a lot better in limited memory environments. They now recommend 4GB minimum.
The production environment that crashed due to Clickhouse OOM was our hosted product a while ago :) After that, we haven't had any downtime on our Clickhouse DB for over a year.
The issue with disk space stems from a bad default configuration. Clickhouse used to have EXTREMELY noisy debug level logging enabled by default with no rotation. This has been fixed in our hosting repo[1] so you get sensible defaults.
If you don't want to worry about downtime, planning disk space or compute capacity, then that's exactly what we offer at https://plausible.io. We process and keep the visitor data on our Hetzner servers in Germany.
1. https://github.com/plausible/hosting
donohoe · 2022-01-13
Not the only provider, worth looking at Plausible.
https://plausible.io/
shafyy · 2021-12-23
If you're looking for web analytics, I love and can recommend Plausible (https://plausible.io/). It's both simple and privacy-friendly.
Inspired by Plausible, I recently launched Fugu (https://fugu.lol). Fugu is a simple and privacy-friendly product analytics tool. It offers only event-based tracking, so it's better suited for web or mobile apps and not web sites (go for Plausible for websites). Fugu doesn't track unique users or any personally identifiable information. It's pretty basic for now, but I'm working on adding conversion funnels next (I work on it in my free time).
Fugu is open-source[0] and self-hostable. I make money by providing a managed version for $9/month.
0: https://github.com/shafy/fugu
wizzwizz4 · 2021-09-03
“Commercial” is not incompatible with “open source”. If you have a policy of “release last year's version under AGPLv3” (and then buy indefinite proprietary licenses for the best community patches off their authors), we'll all benefit from open source without you having competitors leeching off your work.
In fact, some companies can do it with no time delay, like https://plausible.io – but, of course, it depends on your business model and your field.
commoner · 2021-05-26
The best way to prevent someone else from deleting your data is to own it. For anyone looking for alternatives to Google Anayltics, here are a few self-hosted options:
Matomo, open core with a broad feature set: https://matomo.org
Countly, open core with web and mobile tracking: https://count.ly
Plausible, open source with a simple feature set: https://plausible.io
tekacs · 2021-02-08
I feel like free plans work best for products with a business/enterprise side:
- where free users are an onramp for getting $x,xxx/mo-$xx,xxx/mo contracts with companies.
- where many, many free users are subsidized every time a company signs up.
Trello/Jira/Asana seem to fall pretty firmly into that territory.
On the other hand, those running SaaS with fairly low per-month subscription value (e.g. $99-150/mo, as a lot of smaller or bootstrapped SaaSes seem to charge [1]) wouldn't necessarily get much value from these users.
[1]: https://plausible.io/#pricing (just picked these folks at random)
cercatrova · 2020-10-15
I recommend Plausible analytics, open source (AGPL) as well.
https://plausible.io/
rasulkireev · 2020-08-20
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/any-alternatives-to-google-analytics…
Thread on Indiehacker, some great answers there.
My choice is https://plausible.io.
KronisLV · 2023-12-15
> Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.
GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/
Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.
That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/
I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.
As for performance, I guess it depends on whether you care about any of the above, whether they actually help you make your site better. If performance was the top goal, we probably wouldn't be using Angular, React or anything like that in the first place, but only very lightweight options. Or, you know, not putting ads…
nicce · 2023-07-09
I have been fighting a lot with Ghost.
It is good if the provided features are good and enough for you.. but if they aren't, then you are in trouble. I would like to note that Ghost is meant mostly for making content behind subscriptions, since they prioritize adding and improving their subscription features.
The content is meant to be written by hand, with some limitations.
Templating engine is limited, if you want to have some static pages. It is very difficult to generate something from custom data, other than your posts or pages. I wish Ghost had some custom key-value endpoint with their API, but instead if you want to add anything custom, it must be set to the custom configuration file, and it is very limited.
Eventually, you need to embed JSON into JS and then generate some parts of the HTML on client side, what you would instead like to do these in server side.
E.g. if you would like to show for example a table with data.
Or you need to use some other static site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.
Something very simple, but yet so difficult.
I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly read operation, but they are officially dropping support for production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was, that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.
There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and also fully GDPR compliant:…
putrikarunia · 2021-11-02
Oh that's really cool. To answer your questions:
- A/B testing: not supported yet, although we are thinking on building this. Would love to learn more from your use case!
- Incoming referral, bounce rate, time on page are available through our built-in analytics. If you're familiar with Plausible https://plausible.io, we're using their self-hosted version to offer the analytics feature, so you should get everything they offer.
- Not familiar with n8n.io, looks like it's similar to Zapier. We don't have any integration like this yet, but most functional components that you can add to your Typedream site (like forms, waitlist, etc) can be done using HTML embeds. For example, to add a form, you can embed an Airtable form in your Typedream site. This means that any automation supported by those tools can be used.
With that said, interactions such as allowing customer to buy a product, sending emails, and adding orders to Airtable/Google Sheets can be done by using a third party service, like Stripe Payment Links to allow users to buy a product, then use Stripe's functionality or Zapier/n8n.io integrations to send emails or add orders to Airtable/Google Sheets. This is also the case with comments, for example you can embed https://commentbox.io/ into your Typedream site to enable comments.
Hope this makes sense!
jampekka · 2026-01-18
Option a) don't use those embeds
Option b) ask the consent in the embed.
Analytics can be done without banner requiring tracking, e.g. https://plausible.io/
lowkeyokay · 2025-07-28
Thanks for the feedback - means a lot. I had enabled high level usage tracking on Vercel. I was tracking page views to see if I got any users. I have switched to using Plausible [0], a privacy focused analytics tool, and added an opt out option on first load.
[0] https://plausible.io
edit: fixed url
uallo · 2025-02-17
It is not entirely clear who wrote these descriptions. Maybe it was not the vendor. At least their website https://plausible.io/ has a much better wording.
> No need for cookie banners or GDPR consent > > Plausible is privacy-friendly analytics. All the site measurement is carried out absolutely anonymously. Cookies are not used and no personal data is collected. There are no persistent identifiers. No cross-site or cross-device tracking either. Your site data is not used for any other purposes. All visitor data is exclusively processed with servers owned and operated by European companies and it never leaves the EU.
solardev · 2024-11-30
OP, how does this scheme work? If the client is authoritative, that means anybody can just copy that network request and spam you with fake data for that domain. Indeed, if I copy that network request and curl it with changed headers, I still get a 200, which suggests that this is the case...
I'm also concerned about your claim for GDPR compliance. Keeping an IP address for a day and then incrementing against it is still storing personal information, even if it's not in a cookie. Using a server to do the tracking doesn't automatically exempt it from cookie notices.
Storing the IP address for a day doesn't automatically make it non-PII, either. At the very least you should be hashing it. See what Plausible does at https://plausible.io/data-policy or read up on the GDPR discussion at https://ec.europa.eu/justice/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommen…
just-tom · 2024-11-29
The screenshot on your homepage looks very similar to plausible's https://plausible.io/ which is also open-source analytics software. Is it based on it? What are the differences?
Edit: Just noticed the feature comparison in the readme.
dariubs · 2024-08-17
I think it's just a hosted version of https://plausible.io:
https://github.com/plausible
wcedmisten · 2024-07-05
This is funny to me because it also looks just like Plausible Analytics' design. (They also used Tailwind). I guess both took heavy inspiration from the tailwind example design
https://plausible.io
bentlegen · 2024-06-24
Plausible is great (I use it at Sentry), but I want to clarify that only Plausible Community Edition is open source, and it note it differs significantly from their paid SaaS offering:
https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
jvanderbot · 2024-06-24
Shout out to Plausible for open-source, dead-simple, Saas-or-self-hosted analytics.
https://plausible.io
vednig · 2024-04-22
Also, currently we are using https://plausible.io/ for analytics. No other bugs.