Estonia's answer to Google Analytics, in under 1 KB
Plausible is the tool that made privacy analytics mainstream. One page, no tabs, no configuration: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, and then sources, pages, countries, devices, and goals underneath. The tracking script is under 1 KB, which is roughly a fiftieth of Google Analytics, and it sets no cookies, so no consent banner is required. The company is a small bootstrapped team in Tartu, Estonia, running since 2018.
The thing readers get wrong about Plausible is the money. Because it is open source and privacy-first, people assume there is a free hosted plan. There is not. Plausible Cloud gives you 30 days free and then charges, starting at $9 per month billed annually for 10,000 monthly pageviews on one site. Free means self-hosting the Community Edition, which is a genuinely free and unlimited option if you can run a two-database Docker deployment.
The people Plausible fits, paying or self-hosting
- Site owners who want a beautiful, honest dashboard and are happy to pay a small amount for it
- Developers who will self-host and want the best-looking open-source option
- EU businesses that want data in the EU with no consent banner
- Sites where page speed scores matter, thanks to the sub-1 KB script
Free means self-hosting, and the cloud price starts at $9
What Plausible Cloud gives you is a 30-day trial with no credit card required, which runs on full Business-plan features. After that you pick a paid tier or you stop.
The free route is Community Edition. It is AGPL-3.0 licensed (the tracking script is released separately under MIT so that embedding it does not pull your site into AGPL terms), and there are no pageview caps, site caps, or feature gates. You need PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, both of which are covered by the official Docker compose setup. Realistically this is a half-hour job for someone who has deployed containers before and an afternoon of frustration for someone who has not.
Cloud pricing as of 20 July 2026, at the entry 10,000 pageview tier and billed annually: Starter $9 per month (1 site), Growth $14 (3 sites, 3 members), Business $19 (10 sites, 10 members, funnels, ecommerce revenue, 5-year retention). Monthly billing costs about a sixth more. Prices climb with your traffic tier, and Plausible does not publish a full table for higher volumes.
The ClickHouse requirement, and four more limits
- No free hosted plan, which is the single most common surprise for people arriving from a "free alternatives" search
- No session replay and no heatmaps, by design
- Funnels and ecommerce revenue metrics are gated to the Business tier
- Self-hosting needs ClickHouse alongside Postgres, making it heavier to run than Umami
- Higher-volume Cloud pricing is not published, so budgeting past 10,000 pageviews means using the calculator
Beautiful if you self-host, a paid product if you do not
If you self-host, Plausible is arguably the best-designed open-source analytics tool there is, and we would happily recommend it over Umami on looks and polish alone. If you do not self-host, be clear-eyed: this is a paid product with a trial, and at $9 to $19 a month it is good value but it is not free. Anyone who came here specifically because they wanted to stop paying should look at Umami's free Hobby plan or PostHog's free tier first, then come back to Plausible when the budget exists or the Docker skills do.
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