Plausible: Simple web analytics tool you can use to measure site traffic

The goal of Plausible Analytics is to provide you all the valuable and actionable website traffic metrics at a glance in a simple and modern web analytics dashboard.

You get to check your website traffic without deep layers of menus and without a need to create custom reports. Plausible presents you with all the most insightful website statistics on one single page. Here’s a closer look.

1. What are web analytics?
2. Google Analytics is a complex tool that requires education
3. Plausible a simple web analytics tool
4. Plausible is a more simple solution in other ways too
5. Give Plausible a chance with a 30-day free trial

What are web analytics?

Web analytics is the process of measuring and analyzing the usage of a website. Website owners use the analytics data to assess the performance of a site, to figure out what they’re doing well and what no so well and to see what they can do to improve and optimize their future efforts.

Google Analytics is a complex tool that requires education

Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool. It is installed on and is tracking website traffic on 85% of all websites that use known web analytics tools. Google Analytics is widely spread but it is far from being an easy and simple site analytics tool to use.

When you open your Google Analytics, you’re welcomed with a very busy page full of analytics metrics. On the navigational menu on the left-hand side, you have ten different sections. Opening each of these ten menu items, we can count more than 40 sub-sections.

More than 20 of these sub-sections have additional menu items within them. The total count of these additional menu items is at more than 85 reports.

So in total, Google Analytics on the left-hand side navigation menu has more than 125 items for different reports you can gather your insights from. All these different reports track more than 290 different metrics combined.

That’s a full-time job which requires a lot of time, effort, expertise and experience to do well. Many Google Analytics users end up needing to create their own custom dashboards where they add different widgets with useful metrics that they actually get value from.

Then they ignore everything else that Google Analytics tracks. Many just ignore it completely as it’s overwhelming to even start with.

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

It is a maximalist and overkill solution for most website owners. This is what made us build Plausible and why we believe Plausible is a great Google Analytics alternative.

Plausible a simple web analytics tool

Plausible cuts through all that noise that Google Analytics creates. Plausible is more simple to use as it tracks a smaller number of metrics and presents them on an easier to understand dashboard.

Rather than tracking every metric imaginable, many of them that you will never find a use for, Plausible focuses on the most essential website stats only.

There is no navigational menu. There are no additional sub-menus. There is no need to create custom reports. We provide you with a simple and useful web analytics dashboard out of the box.

It is easy to use and understand with no training or prior experience. Everything you need to know about your website traffic is on one page:

1. Choose the time range that you want to analyze. The visitor numbers are automatically presented on an hourly, daily or monthly graph but you can also change to a different interval. The default time frame is set at the last 30 days.
2. See the number of unique visitors, total visits (sessions), total pageviews, views per visit, bounce rate and visit duration. Click to display the individual metric in the top graph. These metrics include a percentage comparison to the previous time period so you understand if the trends are going up or down. There’s also a full comparison more for even more insights.
3. Right below that you see all the top referral sources of traffic (including paid marketing campaigns) and all the most visited pages on your site (including entry and exit pages). Click on the “Details” button to see the complete list with further information.
4. Underneath the referral sources and the most visited pages, you see the list of countries, regions and cities your traffic is coming from. You can also see the device, browser and operating system your visitors are using. Click on a particular browser or OS to see the list of versions too.
5. Last but not least, you can even track events and goals to identify the number of converted visitors, conversion rate, to understand who is converting and the referral sites that send the traffic that converts the best. You can send custom properties, you can track revenue and you can create funnels too.

With Plausible, you get all the important web analytics at a glance so you can focus on creating a better site.

We welcome feedback from our community. There’s a public roadmap and it’s driven by the features suggested by our community members. We are available to you via email too if you have any questions or need any help.

We are an open-source web analytics platform too and our code is accessible to everyone so you can read and review it.

Plausible is a more simple solution in other ways too

1. Lightweight script that doesn’t slow down your site

Analytics scripts have a performance impact on the page weight and the loading time speed of a website. Plausible aims to provide you with all the essential website traffic insights without a negative impact on your site speed.

Our analytics script is 75 times smaller than the Google Analytics script. It is lighter and faster to load so you will reduce the page weight of your site compared to when using Google Analytics.

2. Web analytics without the use of cookies and other privacy-invasive tools

Plausible doesn’t use cookies and doesn’t track nor collect any personal data. This means that Plausible provides you web analytics compliant with the cookie law and privacy regulations out of the box.

There is no need for you to have a complex privacy policy because of the Plausible analytics, collection of personal data or cookies.

3. You can keep your website experience simple and visitor-friendly

Plausible is built as a privacy-first web analytics tool. By using Plausible, you don’t need to compromise the user experience of your website. You don’t need to have any prompts to obtain consent for GDPR, CCPA or PECR.

You don’t need to show any cookie banners either. You can focus on creating a pure web experience instead and your visitors can enjoy your site without any annoyances and distractions.

4. Simple to set up and integrate into your website

Plausible is simple to set up and integrate into your website no matter which CMS you use or how you’ve built your site. You simply insert our one-line JavaScript snippet into the <head> section of the pages you’d like to keep an eye on and the numbers will start rolling in.

5. Much easier to get business insights as compared to Google Analytics 4

Fetching most of even basic business insights from GA4 requires going through multiple different standard reports while editing them, using Explorations to build custom tables from scratch, or using a combination of both depending upon the use case. There’s no exact one-stop overview with simple metrics.

For example, there’s a straightforward Exit Pages report available in the Plausible dashboard. But you would need to build a full-fledged custom report (“Explorations”) from scratch in Google Analytics to learn the same insight.

Similarly, you would need to build a custom report with multiple complex dimensions and metrics to learn how many conversions were acquired from which source, page, city, device, etc. –– all in one page. Again, this is as easy as applying a few filters in Plausible’s dashboard.

We cover all these instances where Plausible is easier to use than GA4 in this comparison.

6. Created by an independent developer

Plausible is not created by one of the largest companies in the world and is not run by a huge team. Plausible is created by a small independent team and no external funding. By using Plausible, you will support indie-developers, indie-businesses and an independent web.

Give Plausible a chance with a 30-day free trial

Plausible is a simple, open-source and privacy-friendly site analytics tool. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial and explore our GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant simple web analytics dashboard. You don’t need to remove your current analytics provider either until you’ve tested Plausible and figured out if you like our product.