What makes Plausible a great Google Analytics alternative

Many site owners have the habit of installing the Google Analytics tracking script on their sites as one of the first actions they take after the launch.

Here’s why you should break the habit of using Google Analytics and consider Plausible Analytics as a simple, lightweight, ethical, open source and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.

1. Plausible vs Google Analytics comparison: What are the differences?
   1. Easy to use vs complex web analytics
   2. Data ownership of your web analytics
   3. Open source vs closed source web analytics
   4. Privacy of your website visitors
   5. Compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and PECR
   6. Compromising the user experience of your website visitors
   7. Improved data accuracy
   8. Avoiding the adblockers
   9. Increasing the page weight and the loading time
   10. A public roadmap driven by the community
   11. David vs Goliath
2. Why isn’t Plausible free while Google Analytics is free?
3. Why is Plausible a great Google Analytics alternative?

Plausible vs Google Analytics comparison: What are the differences?

Easy to use vs complex web analytics

Google Analytics is overkill for most website owners. It’s a powerful but complex tool that takes time to understand and requires training. Google Analytics collects way too many data points and most people find real and regular use for only a fraction of the data it measures.

Plausible is easy to use and understand with no training or prior experience necessary. Plausible cuts through the noise by presenting all the important website traffic and business insights on an intuitive dashboard.

There are no layers of navigational menus, there is no need to create custom reports. You get all the important web analytics at a glance so you can focus on creating a better site and a better business.

You can invite team members, you can integrate with Search Console and you can import your historical Google Analytics stats. There’s a realtime dashboard, a landing pages report, you can track conversion and revenue attribution, you can optimize your conversion rate using sales funnels and much more. All on one single page. Take a look at our live demo.

Data ownership of your web analytics

By using Plausible, you keep 100% ownership of your website data and you protect the privacy of your visitors at the same time. You can self-host Plausible on your own server. Even when using our hosted service, your website analytics are stored on our server in the cloud, but you remain completely in control of your site data and you fully own all of your data too.

1. Your website data is not shared with advertising companies or any other companies in general.
2. Your website data is not sent to any third-parties at all.
3. Your website data is not mined and harvested for personal and behavioral trends.
4. Your website data is not monetized.

That is not necessarily the case with Google Analytics, a tool that is created, hosted and run by the largest adtech company in the world. A company that loves to devour all the personal data available to it.

Open source vs closed source web analytics

Plausible is an open source web analytics tool. Our source code is available and accessible on Github so anyone can read it and review it to ensure it keeps the data private and secure.

This is not the case with Google Analytics which is a closed source product. There’s simply no way of knowing what’s going on behind the scenes when using the Google Analytics script. You have to put your trust in Google.

Privacy of your website visitors

Privacy of web users is under threat but there’s a growing privacy shift going on around the web. Plausible is a part of that shift.

Even though the purpose of Plausible is to track usage of a website, this can still be done without collecting any personal data or personally identifiable information (PII), without using cookies and while respecting the privacy of people. Learn more about what makes us a privacy friendly analytics tool.

By using Google Analytics, you’re sacrificing the privacy of your site visitors. With Plausible you still get all the important insights to help you understand the performance of your site and to see how you can improve your site, but this doesn’t come at a cost of the privacy of your visitors.

Compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and PECR

If you are tracking and collecting personal website usage data, you need to ask for and get explicit consent from the visitor according to the recent regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.

Lawmakers around the world have realized the severity of the situation and several different personal data and privacy regulations have been introduced such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) in the United Kingdom.

Google Analytics collects a lot of personal data and it is a potential liability for your site. Many website owners fail to do this, but you should and must disclose to your visitors your use of Google Analytics to track them.

Here’s an independent legal assessment on GDPR-compliance of Plausible and Google Analytics written by an experienced data protection expert and lawyer.

Since January 2022, several European Data Protection Authorities have decided that the use of Google Analytics violates GDPR. These include Austria, France, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. These decisions are regarding EEA-US data transfers.

All of the visitor data that Plausible tracks and collects is exclusively processed on servers and cloud infrastructure owned and operated by European providers. This ensures that all of the website data is being covered by the European Union’s strict laws on data privacy.

You don’t have to worry about Schrems II and that it invalidates the EU-US Privacy Shield when using Plausible. Your website data never leaves the EU.

Compromising the user experience of your website visitors

When you’re using Google Analytics, you’re making the user experience on your site more inconvenient. To abide by the privacy regulations, you need to compromise the visitor experience by displaying annoying cookie banners and GDPR or CCPA consent notices. You also need to present comprehensive privacy policy in regard to analytics tracking.

By using Plausible, you don’t need to have any GDPR, CCPA, PECR or cookie prompts anymore and you don’t need a complex privacy policy about analytics either. By using Plausible, you are not using cookies and you are not tracking any personal data after all. Your visitors can enjoy your site without any annoyances and distractions.

We’re happy to provide information on how Plausible is built to help you comply with the different privacy regulations. We encourage you to discuss specific issues with your lawyer to help you decide whether our service allows you to fulfill the legal requirements that apply to you.

Improved data accuracy

With Plausible, you not only count visitors who reject the GDPR consent banner but you also gain the advantage of several built-in measures designed to improve the accuracy of your statistics:

• Known referrer spam domains and traffic originating from data centers is filtered out. We exclude ~32K data center IP ranges (i.e. a lot of bot IP addresses) by default, preventing bot traffic from inflating your stats. For eg., Cookiebot CMP users see a constant spike in their direct traffic because their sites are scanned constantly by the Cookiebot’s bots, requiring manual exclusions in GA4. There are other similar instances, but Plausible handles them all automatically for you.
• We attempt to uncover traffic originating from Android apps which is traditionally categorized as “Direct / None” in Google Analytics. For sites with significant mobile traffic, this recovers 10% or more previously unattributed traffic from apps like Gmail, Slack and Telegram
• Visitors that use VPN services and the Tor browser are grouped under the “Anonymous VPN Service” entry in the Countries list to eliminate the noise that these services add to the locations report

Avoiding the adblockers

Many people have got enough of banner advertising, retargeting and remarketing messages and behavioral profiling so they choose to block some of these distractions.

Google Analytics script is impacted by browsers such as Firefox and Safari. With tech-savvy audiences, the level of people blocking Google Analytics gets up to 60%.

Plausible is not a part of the adtech industry. It doesn’t track any personal data whatsoever, doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t play any part in the profiling of personal behaviors around the web so we’re not usually blocked by the browsers.

You also have the option to proxy our script from your domain name as a first party connection to bypass any adblockers.

With Plausible, you can count visitors who reject the GDPR consent banner and those who use adblockers which leads to a much higher accuracy in your stats. An independent study on GA4’s data accuracy found that when consent banners are displayed, GA4 fails to capture an average of 55.6% of the traffic compared to Plausible.

Increasing the page weight and the loading time

Analytics scripts have a performance impact on the page weight and the loading time speed of a website. Plausible Analytics is a lightweight web analytics tool that aims to provide you with all the essential website traffic insights without a negative impact on the web speed.

Plausible Analytics script is more than 75 times smaller than a typical Google Analytics script. By using Plausible Analytics, you will reduce your page weight and your site will load faster too.

A public roadmap driven by the community

With Plausible you can be a part of the development. Take a look at our public roadmap which itself is defined by our community. You can leave your feedback and have your say on metrics and features we should be adding next to the product.

Google, on the other hand, is notorious for not listening to their users, not providing any way to reach the customer support to get help and even by shutting down products that millions of people love.

David vs Goliath

Google Analytics is installed on and is tracking website traffic on 85% of all websites. A majority of web traffic is tracked by a single company. And that one company is also the largest advertising company in the world. What could possibly go wrong?

Plausible, on the other hand, is not created by one of the largest companies in the world and is not run by a huge team. By using Plausible, you will support indie-developers, indie-businesses and the independent web. You can learn more about us.

Why isn’t Plausible free while Google Analytics is free?

All this sounds great but Google Analytics is free to use. Why isn’t Plausible free too?

Google Analytics is free because Google has built their company and their wealth by collecting and analyzing huge amounts of personal information from web users and using these personal and behavioral insights to sell advertisements.

Plausible has no part in that business model. No personal data is being collected and analyzed either. With Plausible, you fully own and control all of the data and it is not being shared with or sold to any third-parties.

Plausible is independently owned and developed. To keep the project going and to stay in business we need to charge a fee.

Why is Plausible a great Google Analytics alternative?

Plausible is a simple and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. It is an independent, open source and transparent analytics tool.

Plausible is here to provide you all the valuable website traffic insights at a glance while respecting the privacy of your visitors, being compliant with GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulations, and without compromising the user experience.

Do you have a website or a business? Give Plausible a chance. Sign up for a 30-day free trial with no obligations and explore our simple and privacy-friendly website analytics dashboard.

You can even import your historical Google Analytics stats into Plausible.