Plausible Analytics

The free alternative toFathom Analytics,Simple Analytics,Google Analytics

🟡 Intermediate⏱️ ~30 min to installYou save €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.

29.1kView on GitHub ↗

Versus Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud: the match

Price
Plausible Analytics
€0, as many sites as you want
Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud
By traffic tier, per site
Your data
Plausible Analytics
On your server, raw database accessible
Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud
On their servers, limited export
Privacy
Plausible Analytics
No cookies, no banner
Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud
No cookies either, but at a third party

Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud ↗

VS	Plausible Analytics	Fathom / Simple Analytics / Plausible Cloud ↗
Price	€0, as many sites as you want	By traffic tier, per site
Your data	On your server, raw database accessible	On their servers, limited export
Privacy	No cookies, no banner	No cookies either, but at a third party
What you see	Visitors, sources, pages, goals, funnels	The same
Ad blockers	Served from YOUR domain, rarely blocked	Often blocked

How to install it (even from zero)

A server with Docker and 2 GB of RAM: Plausible needs two databases (PostgreSQL and ClickHouse), the official setup brings them up for you in one command.

1
Plan a subdomain
For example stats.yourdomain.com, pointed at your server. That is what enables the automatic certificate, and what makes your script nearly invisible to ad blockers.

Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

It installs the community edition from the official repositories and wires your first site:

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.

3
Add the script and watch your first visit arrive
One line in your site's head. Open your dashboard, visit your page from your phone: you should see yourself appear in real time.

What you actually do with it

Know where your visitors come from

Instagram, Google, an email, a link in bio: every source is counted, and the UTM parameters of your links tell you which story or campaign really brought people.

Measure what matters, not just views

One goal per important action (signup, click on the booking button, download) and a funnel showing where people drop. That is where you decide what to improve.

All your sites on one screen

Launching a project a month? Each site gets its dashboard, and you switch between them without changing tools or paying one more subscription.

Project health, at a glance

Before installing an open-source tool, one question matters: is the project alive? These scores are computed from public GitHub data. They are not made up.

89/100

Excellent

Very active, well-maintained project: go ahead with confidence.

Activity: 100
Maintenance: 100
Community: 91
Maturity: 100
Momentum: 52

The repo in numbers

GitHub stars: 29.1k
Forks: 1.9k
Contributors: 110
Commits: 4.4k
Project age: 7.8 yrs
Last commit: today
Size: 657.6 MB
License: AGPL-3.0

Built with

Elixir 79.9%
TypeScript 14.5%
JavaScript 2.2%
HTML 2.1%
PLpgSQL 0.9%

Scores computed automatically from the GitHub API (last-30-days activity, update freshness, community size, project age). Refreshed daily.

Loucash’s take

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.

It’s for you if: 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.