What Is Plausible Analytics?
Plausible Analytics is an open-source web analytics tool made by Plausible Insights, an independent company based in Estonia. The project began at the end of 2018 and has grown without outside investors. Its aim is to answer a site's basic questions, such as how many people came, where they came from and what they looked at, without tracking individuals.
It runs on a very small script and shows everything on a single dashboard: visitors, page views, sources, countries and devices. It uses no cookies and no persistent visitor ID; unique visitors are counted with a key that changes every day and is then deleted, and raw IP addresses are not stored. Goals, custom events, UTM campaign tracking and a Google Search Console connection are built in.
The software is open source under the AGPL license. The free Community Edition can be installed on your own server, while the hosted version is a paid subscription after a free trial and keeps its data in the EU, on servers in Germany. Some features, such as funnels and revenue tracking, are available only in the hosted version.
Where We Use Plausible
We choose Plausible when a site needs clear numbers rather than a complex setup, most often for these jobs:
Corporate and Brand Sites
On company and brand sites that mainly need the essentials, it shows at a glance how many visits came in, which pages were read and where visitors came from, for each language version too.
Goals and Events
Form submissions, file downloads and clicks on phone or message buttons become goals and appear on the same dashboard next to the sources that brought them, so you can see which channels bring real inquiries.
Campaign Measurement
We add UTM tags to links in ads, newsletters and social media posts, so each campaign shows up as its own source and you can compare the visits and goals it brings.
Shared Dashboards
We share the dashboard with your team through a link or send it as a regular email report, so everyone sees the same numbers without needing an analytics account.
Why Plausible?
No Cookies, No Personal Data
Plausible doesn't use cookies or collect personal data, and its makers state that it needs no cookie banner. Whether your site as a whole needs one is a question for your lawyer.
Light and Fast
Its script is tiny, so it doesn't weigh the page down, which shows both in PageSpeed Insights results and in how quickly the site feels on a phone.
A Dashboard Anyone Can Read
Everything fits on one page. You don't need training or custom-built reports to see how your site is doing in a minute.
How We Work on Your Project
First we talk about the questions you want answered. If Plausible's simplicity is enough, we recommend it; if you need deeper analysis or close links with ad platforms, GA4 may suit you better. Then we add the script to the site, define goals and events and set up a UTM scheme for your campaign links.
Before launch we make test visits to check that each goal shows up on the dashboard, and exclude your own team's visits so they don't inflate the figures. At handover we share the dashboard with you and show you how to read it.
