Is Plausible Analytics really free?

Yes. Plausible Analytics is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Fathom Analytics, on the other hand, costs €13 a month.

Do I need to code to install Plausible Analytics?

No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 30 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.

How is it different from Fathom Analytics?

Plausible Analytics does most of what Fathom Analytics does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

Free alternative

Free alternative to Fathom Analytics

Fathom Analytics costs €13 a month. Plausible Analytics does the same job for free, in open source: you install it on your machine or a small server, and you stop paying.

Public entry price, taken from Fathom Analytics’s website (usefathom.com). Over a year, that is €156 that stays in your pocket.

What replaces Fathom Analytics

The main alternative

Plausible Analytics

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~30 min to installSave €13/mo

Plausible is the audience dashboard Google Analytics should have been: a single page, the numbers that matter (visitors, page views, sources, countries, devices, goals reached), readable in ten seconds. The script weighs under a kilobyte and sets no cookie, so no consent banner to show. At a time when you can ship a website in an evening, not knowing who comes, from where, and what they do is flying blind. Plausible comes as a paid hosted version and as a community edition, the same application to install on your server: your data stays on your domain, you access the raw database, you track as many sites as you want.

Loucash’s verdict on Plausible Analytics

8/10

I run a tool from the same family on my server (Umami), and it feeds my dashboard: where people come from, which story filled the library, how many clicked in an email. Without it you publish in the dark. Plausible is the other big name of the genre, and on the dashboard it is even a notch ahead: goals, funnels, revenue, an instant read. Two things to know. It is hungrier: two databases including ClickHouse, count 2 GB of RAM, where Umami makes do with one PostgreSQL. And the community edition is genuinely open source (AGPL), but the vendor treats it as the little brother of its paid version: some features land later, and support is community-run. Nothing blocking, just worth knowing before choosing. If you have a server with some headroom, it is the most pleasant dashboard you can own.

Who it is for: You launch websites and want to know who comes, from where, and what they do, without Google, without a cookie banner and without a per-site subscription.

See the full page →See the tool ↗

The prompt that installs Plausible Analytics

Paste this prompt into Claude: it checks the repository, asks you its questions and installs the tool step by step.

Installe Plausible Analytics sur mon serveur, en édition communautaire auto-hébergée. Le code de l'application est le dépôt GitHub plausible/analytics ; l'installation officielle est le dépôt plausible/community-edition (un docker compose avec PostgreSQL et ClickHouse). Clone ce dépôt d'installation, configure le fichier d'environnement (BASE_URL avec mon sous-domaine, SECRET_KEY_BASE généré), lance les conteneurs, et vérifie que l'interface répond en HTTPS. Guide-moi ensuite pour créer mon compte, ajouter mon premier site et poser le script de suivi dans mes pages. Explique chaque étape simplement, je débute.

Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.

Frequently asked questions

Is Plausible Analytics really free?: Yes. Plausible Analytics is open source: the code is public and installing it costs nothing. At most you pay for hosting if you put it on a server, often a few euros a month. Fathom Analytics, on the other hand, costs €13 a month.
Do I need to code to install Plausible Analytics?: No. The level is intermediate and the install takes about 30 minutes with the prompt from the page: Claude does the work, you answer its questions.
How is it different from Fathom Analytics?: Plausible Analytics does most of what Fathom Analytics does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point by point comparison is on the page.
Do I own my data?: Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.