Self-hosted Google Analytics alternative: Plausible

Google Analytics gives you a firehose of data, a heavy script, a cookie banner, and the small matter of handing your visitors' behaviour to an advertising company. For a lot of sites that's a bad trade — you wanted to know "how many people read the post and where they came from," not to run a surveillance operation on your own readers. Plausible is the self-hosted answer: simple, privacy-first web analytics you own.

What Plausible is

Plausible is a lightweight analytics tool built around one idea: show you the numbers that actually matter, without the weight or the privacy cost. One clean dashboard — visitors, page views, sources, top pages, countries, devices — and that's rather the point. No 40-tab labyrinth, no data you'll never look at.

• A tiny script — a fraction of the size of the Google Analytics tag, so your pages stay fast.
• No cookies, privacy-first by design — which in many cases means no cookie banner needed, and a much easier story under GDPR and similar rules.
• One simple, readable dashboard that a non-analyst can actually understand.
• Goals and funnels when you need them, without the complexity tax when you don't.

Why self-host it?

Plausible offers a hosted service too, and it's a fine product. Self-hosting it changes two things:

• Your visitors' data never leaves your infrastructure. No third party in the loop at all — the strongest possible version of the privacy pitch.
• No per-pageview bill. A busy site on a hosted analytics plan gets expensive; self-hosted, it's just your server.

For a privacy-minded site, "the analytics run on my own server" is a claim worth being able to make honestly.

How to deploy it

Plausible is a small stack: the app plus the databases it uses to store and crunch events, behind TLS on a domain. Once it's up, you add your site, drop the one-line script into your pages (or your framework's head), and stats start flowing within seconds. On a VPS that's a quick setup and then the usual updates and backups; or deploy Plausible in one click with the databases and TLS handled, and get straight to the part where you paste in a script tag.

Then: watch the numbers, not the dashboard

The nicest thing about Plausible is what happens after setup: you check it, you understand it in ten seconds, and you get on with your day. It's analytics that respects both your visitors and your attention — the two things Google Analytics quietly spends. If you've been meaning to get off it, this is the clean exit.

Deploy Plausible → — or browse the full catalog of apps you can host and own.