Google Analytics vs Plausible Analytics
Google Analytics and Plausible Analytics are both web analytics software. Google Analytics is a commercial product from Google. Plausible Analytics is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 30k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Google Analytics when
- You run Google Ads or need free, widely understood traffic reporting and can accept Google processing your visitor data.
- Pick Plausible Analytics when
- You want privacy-compliant site analytics that non-technical staff can read at a glance.
Side by side
Tracks website and app visits, traffic sources, conversions and user behaviour, and feeds Google Ads audiences.
Lightweight, cookie-free web analytics showing traffic, sources, goals and conversions on a single dashboard, as a hosted service or self-hosted community edition.
GA4's interface and data model are hard for casual users, it needs cookie consent in the EU, and data sampling and thresholds hide detail.
AGPL license, and the self-hosted community edition lags the paid cloud on features.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Cloud service and self-hosted server
Not published
Elixir, Phoenix, ClickHouse and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Google
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
652 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
30k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 8 years ago, latest release v3.2.1.
Other comparisons
More web and product analytics tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.