Plausible is a lightweight, cookieless, open source web analytics tool that gives you the metrics you actually use without the privacy baggage. How it replaces Google Analytics — and when it does not.
Google Analytics has become a liability
Google Analytics 4 is powerful but bloated, cookie-dependent, GDPR-problematic and increasingly inaccurate as ad blockers and consent banners eat into your data. The interface is hostile, the data model is convoluted and most teams use 5 percent of its features. Meanwhile, the real cost is not money — it is privacy risk, consent-management overhead and the engineering time spent making sense of it.
Plausible is an open source, self-hosted web analytics tool. It is cookieless, GDPR-compliant by default, weighs under 1 KB and shows you pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, time on page, referrers, UTM campaigns and goals on a single clean dashboard. No consent banner required.
What Plausible delivers
- Real-time dashboard with all core metrics on one page
- Cookieless tracking — no consent banner needed in most jurisdictions
- Custom events and goal conversion tracking
- UTM campaign and referrer breakdown
- Email and Slack reports
- Public dashboard sharing
- API for custom integrations and data export
- Lightweight script (under 1 KB) that does not slow your site
Cost comparison
Plausible Cloud starts at 90 SEK per month for 10 000 pageviews. Self-hosted Plausible on a small server costs under 300 SEK per month and scales to millions of pageviews. Against the hidden cost of running Google Analytics — consent management tooling, legal review, engineering time and the data you lose to blockers — self-hosted Plausible is essentially free.
Plausible vs Matomo and Umami
Matomo is the most feature-complete Google Analytics alternative, with heatmaps, session recording and a plugin ecosystem. It is also heavier and more complex to operate. Umami is the lightest and simplest, ideal for small sites. Plausible sits in the sweet spot: more capable than Umami, far simpler than Matomo, and with the best default dashboard of the three.
Migration from Google Analytics
- Create a Plausible site and add the tracking script to your layout
- Define goals and custom events matching your GA conversions
- Set up UTM conventions and document them for the team
- Run both tools in parallel for 30 days to compare numbers
- Expect Plausible to report fewer sessions — it deduplicates better and is not inflated by bots
- Remove GA once the team trusts the new numbers
- Update your privacy policy and remove the consent banner if applicable
Honest limitations
Plausible is not a full marketing analytics suite. There is no user-level tracking, no funnel analysis beyond goals, no cohort analysis and no e-commerce revenue tracking out of the box. If you depend on GA4's advanced attribution or BigQuery export, Plausible will not replace that workflow. For 90 percent of sites, though, the core metrics are all that matter.
Verdict
If your site does not need enterprise attribution, Plausible is a clear upgrade: simpler, faster, privacy-respecting and cheaper. It is the analytics tool we install on every new SIAX project by default.
About the publisher
SIAX Technology AB publishes guides on cloud infrastructure, data, automation and open source.
About SIAX