Plausible: pricing, pros and cons
Plausible is cookieless, under 1 KB, open source and self-hostable, and the whole report fits on one page. Everything advanced was traded away deliberately.
- Price
- $9/moestimate
- At 50 people
- $108/yr
- Free tier
- Yes30-day trial, no card required.
- Website
- plausible.io
NotePriced by monthly pageviews; $9 covers 10,000.
Specification
What Plausible supports
The dimensions every analytics tool in our catalogue is compared on.
- Data model
- Pageviews
- Works without cookie consent
- Yes
- Session replay
- No
- Funnels and retention
- Yes
- Real-time reporting
- Yes
- Default retention
- 60 months
- Raw data export
- Yes
- SAML single sign-on
- No
- SOC 2
- No
- EU data residency
- Yes
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Open source
- Yes
- Public API
- Yes
- Native mobile apps
- No
The honest assessment
Plausible: pros and cons
Deliberately simple: you trade every advanced feature for privacy compliance and a page anyone can read.
What it does well
- No cookies and no personal data, so no consent banner is required
- Script is under 1 KB, which is a measurable page-speed difference
- Open source and self-hostable if you want the data on your own server
What it costs you
- Pageview model cannot answer product questions like retention or cohorts
- No session replay, no user-level drill-down by design
- Custom events are limited compared with a real product-analytics tool
Fit
Who Plausible suits
Choose it if
- Content and marketing sites that want no consent banner
- Teams who want a number anyone in the company can read in ten seconds
Look elsewhere if
- Product teams needing retention, cohorts or user-level analysis
- Anyone who needs session replay to understand a drop-off
Head to head
Plausible compared
Direct comparisons against every other analytics tool we cover.
4 alternatives
Other analytics tools worth a look
Everything else we cover in product & web analytics, cheapest first.
Questions
Plausible, answered
What is Plausible best for?
Content and marketing sites that want no consent banner. Teams who want a number anyone in the company can read in ten seconds. In short: lightweight, cookieless web analytics on a single page you can read in ten seconds.
What are the downsides of Plausible?
Pageview model cannot answer product questions like retention or cohorts. No session replay, no user-level drill-down by design. Custom events are limited compared with a real product-analytics tool. The trade-off in one line: Deliberately simple: you trade every advanced feature for privacy compliance and a page anyone can read.
How much does Plausible cost?
$9 a month for the whole account regardless of headcount — about $108 a year. There is a free tier. Priced by monthly pageviews; $9 covers 10,000.
What are the best Plausible alternatives?
In product & web analytics the credible alternatives are Fathom Analytics, Google Analytics 4, Matomo, PostHog. Which fits depends on your team size, budget and non-negotiables — our questionnaire ranks all of them against your answers in about three minutes.
Is Plausible worth switching away from?
Only if one of its real drawbacks is costing you something concrete. Deliberately simple: you trade every advanced feature for privacy compliance and a page anyone can read. If none of the downsides above describe your situation, staying is almost always cheaper than moving — a migration costs weeks, and a tool that merely annoys you is not worth them.
Prices are unverified estimates — useful for comparing orders of magnitude, not for budgeting. Confirm the current figure with the vendor before you commit to anything.
Is Plausible still the right call for your team?
Answer about a dozen questions and we will rank Plausible against every alternative in product & web analytics — with the reasoning shown, and the cost of switching at your actual seat count.