Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics was built around a single constraint: no cookies. Without persistent identifiers, Plausible cannot be classified as tracking software under GDPR or PECR, which means most EU-facing sites can skip the consent banner entirely and still collect accurate, unsampled visitor data. The tracking script weighs under 1 KB — smaller than a typical favicon — so it adds no measurable page-weight penalty or render-blocking overhead.

The dashboard reflects the same philosophy. One screen shows sessions, bounce rate, top pages, referrers, countries, devices, and goal conversions. There is no report labyrinth to navigate. For marketing teams and founders who need a quick read on traffic health without climbing a learning curve, that constraint is a feature rather than a limitation. Plausible also supports public dashboards you can share with clients, email digests, and traffic-spike alerts that fire to your inbox or Slack.

Where it steps back is depth. There is no session replay, no heatmaps, and no multi-step funnel analysis — for that level of product instrumentation, PostHog is the better fit. The hosted plan starts at $9 per month, billed by monthly pageviews, and self-hosting requires running the Elixir/Phoenix application stack alongside PostgreSQL, which is manageable but not a five-minute install. Teams comfortable with that trade-off get full data ownership and no vendor lock-in.