No. 2 of 30 · Privacy-first and cookieless
Plausible Analytics
The tool that made simple, cookieless analytics a category, still one of the two best in it.
Its published price ladder is identical, tier for tier and rung for rung, to Absolutely Analytics'.
The verdict
Plausible is the tool that proved a Google Analytics alternative could be a business rather than a protest, and six years on it remains the default recommendation for a site owner who wants one screen of honest numbers. It is open source, hosted in the EU on European-owned infrastructure, sets no cookies, and reports 21,000 paying subscribers against 313 billion tracked pageviews.
What you get is a single dashboard that a marketing manager can read without training: visitors, pageviews, bounce, duration, sources with automatic channel grouping, top pages, countries, devices, and goals you can define without touching code. Recent additions have been sensible rather than showy. Scroll depth is tracked automatically from 1 to 100 per cent with no tag manager involved. There is a report for traffic arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, which is a genuinely new question site owners have started asking. Search Console connects so search queries sit beside the pages they landed on.
What you actually get
The tiering is the thing to understand before you buy. Starter at £9 gives you one site and one person. Growth at £14 adds three sites, three team members, shared links and embedded dashboards. Business at £19 is where funnels, user journeys, custom properties, ecommerce revenue attribution and the Stats API live. Those are the same three numbers, in the same order, gating a very similar set of features, as the tool ranked above it on this list, and Absolutely Analytics says so openly on its own pricing page rather than pretending otherwise.
So the comparison has to be won somewhere other than price, and where Plausible loses it is behaviour tooling. There are no heatmaps, no scroll maps and no session replay, by choice: the position is that those belong in a different product. That is a coherent view and it is why the behaviour score here is a 2 rather than a 0, since automatic scroll-depth tracking does answer a slice of the question. But it means a site owner who wants to know why nobody clicks the pricing button is buying a second subscription, and the practical floor for that is Microsoft Clarity for nothing or Hotjar for rather more.
Best for
Site owners who want the cleanest, most legible traffic dashboard on the market from a company with six years of public track record, and who either do not want behaviour tooling or are happy to run it separately.
Getting it running
One script tag, about a kilobyte. A WordPress plugin, an npm package and a proxy option exist for people who want the request served from their own domain. The Google Analytics importer works and is worth running before you cancel anything.
What to watch out for
No heatmaps and no session replay, which on a marketing site is a real gap rather than a rounding error. The published limit policy locks dashboards after two consecutive months over allowance, which is gentler than Fathom's week but harder than the tool ranked above it. Funnels and the Stats API sit behind the £19 tier, so the useful ceiling is higher than the headline price suggests.
Pricing and practicalities
Ten volume rungs from 10,000 to 10M+ monthly pageviews. Three years of retention on Starter and Growth, five on Business. Annual billing takes two months off. Self-hosting the community edition is free and genuinely supported, though you carry the ClickHouse operations yourself. Prices read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Anyone who needs to see where people click as well as where they land, who will end up pairing it with something else and should price that pair honestly against Absolutely Analytics. It is also not the choice if you want your data on your own hardware without running a database cluster, where Matomo is the better-trodden path.
How it compares
Read it directly against Absolutely Analytics, since the prices are the same and the decision is therefore purely about what you get for them. Against Fathom Analytics it is the deeper product at the same money, with funnels, segments and an API that Fathom does not match.
Head to head:
The ten measures
Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.
What this rests on
Plausible's own homepage and pricing panel, read 2026-09-11; its published subscriber and pageview figures; its documentation on scroll depth, AI-traffic reporting and Search Console; its published limit policy.
Desk research against the vendor's published material and public documentation. I have used the public live demo dashboard but have not run it on a site of my own, so the insight score reflects the demo and the documented feature set.
This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.