Plausible Analytics

Plausible's whole thesis is that most site owners are over-served by Google Analytics and under-served by privacy-first tools that only count pageviews. It threads that needle better than most. The single-page dashboard is the core of the product: pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, visit duration and top sources on one screen, updating every 30 seconds. For a marketing site, that answers most questions before you open a second tab. The depth has quietly grown. Scroll depth from 1 to 100 percent is tracked automatically on every page — no tag manager, no extra script — and scroll goals convert that into a metric you can filter on. Codeless goals turn any page into a goal and automatically capture file downloads, form completions and external link clicks. Funnels now come in two flavors: strict order, where every step must happen consecutively with no detour, and flexible, where visitors only need to complete the first and last steps — useful when people take different paths to the same purchase. User journeys, shipped May 2026, shows the paths visitors actually take from a start or end perspective, which surfaces flows you'd never have hypothesized. Revenue goals now report total revenue and revenue per visitor at the relevant funnel step, and funnels can be compared across two date ranges side by side. Annotations, added July 2026, let you pin a personal or site-wide note to the chart so a traffic spike carries its explanation. Full-URL breakdowns in the Top Pages, Entry and Exit reports, added June 2026, make subdomain analysis practical. The AI Assistants channel is the 2026 feature that has no direct equivalent in most competitors at this price point: it isolates traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini and Perplexity as its own channel, with historical data reclassified, so you can see which pages AI tools send people to and what those visitors convert on. Where it doesn't fit: Plausible has no session recordings, no heatmaps, and no user-level behavioral analytics — it aggregates by design, and that's a deliberate product choice, not a gap awaiting a fix. Custom properties and Stats API access sit on the Business plan, so lightweight installs that later need them will outgrow the lower tiers. The statistical API and Sites API have rate limits that vary by plan. Self-hosting gives you full data control but not the cloud-only team features. And because data retention is tiered, long-horizon analysis needs the right plan from the start.