Matomo vs Plausible Analytics
Matomo and Plausible Analytics are both web analytics software. Matomo is open source under GPL-3.0, with 22k GitHub stars. Plausible Analytics is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 30k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Matomo when
- An organisation needs detailed analytics under its own control, for example for privacy rules in the public sector or EU.
- Pick Plausible Analytics when
- You want privacy-compliant site analytics that non-technical staff can read at a glance.
Side by side
A full web analytics platform comparable to Google Analytics, with goals, e-commerce, segments and reports, self-hosted or cloud.
Lightweight, cookie-free web analytics showing traffic, sources, goals and conversions on a single dashboard, as a hosted service or self-hosted community edition.
Heavy on MySQL at high traffic, and many features such as heatmaps and funnels are paid plugins.
AGPL license, and the self-hosted community edition lags the paid cloud on features.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and self-hosted server
PHP, MySQL and Vue
Elixir, Phoenix, ClickHouse and PostgreSQL
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
22k GitHub stars
30k GitHub stars
Established: started 15 years ago, latest release 5.14.2.
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 each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.