Privacy-focused web analytics: no cookies, no personal data, no consent banner

Most analytics tools treat visitor privacy as an afterthought. Plausible was built the other way around.

You get the data you need to understand your site. Your visitors get an experience that doesn’t track, profile or follow them around the web. No cookies, no personal data, no consent banners required.

1. It’s open source web analytics software
2. Hosted in the EU on European-owned infrastructure
3. Completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped
4. Minimal data collection
5. No persistent tracking of any kind
6. No cookies and other persistent identifiers
7. Privacy-first means more complete data, not less
8. You own your website data
9. Your data is never sold, shared or used for ads
10. You can self-host Plausible Analytics
11. Give Plausible a try

It’s open source web analytics software

Plausible Analytics is open source software. Our source code is available and accessible on GitHub.

We are not a black box. Everything is in the open. Anyone can view, review and inspect the code we’re running to verify that we practice what we preach.

This matters in the market for privacy software. Proprietary tools cannot always be trusted when data is at stake. The only way to prove trustworthiness is to let experts look at the code.

Hosted in the EU on European-owned infrastructure

We’re a small team based in the EU. Our legal entity is incorporated in Estonia.

All data we collect is kept fully secured, encrypted and hosted on renewable energy powered servers in Falkenstein, Germany, owned by Hetzner, a European company. We use Bunny (a European provider from Slovenia) for our global CDN and DDoS protection.

All visitor data is exclusively processed on servers owned and operated by European companies, covered by the EU’s strict data privacy laws. Your website data never leaves the EU.

Several EU data protection authorities have declared Google Analytics non-compliant with GDPR because it transfers data to US servers. Switching to Plausible removes that risk entirely.

Completely independent, self-funded and bootstrapped

There are no investors behind Plausible Analytics. We’re not interested in raising funds or taking investment. We’re funded entirely by our subscribers.

That means no pressure to grow at any cost, no acquisition risk and no incentive to monetize your data. The business model is simple: you pay us, we build a better product.

Minimal data collection

We collect only the most essential data points and nothing else.

Other analytics tools like Google Analytics offer hundreds of different reports built on vast data collection that is unnecessary for most website owners.

All the metrics we do collect fit on one single page: page views, unique visitors, referral sources, top pages, countries, devices and browsers. That’s it. This makes Plausible much easier to use. It’s also significantly lighter than Google Analytics so it doesn’t slow down your site or add to your carbon footprint.

You can see exactly what you’d get in our live demo dashboard or review the full list in our data policy.

No persistent tracking of any kind

The goal of Plausible is to track overall trends in your website traffic, not to track individual visitors. All the data is in aggregate only.

We do not track visitors across devices, websites or time. All data is isolated to a single device, a single website and a single day. There is no way to know whether the same person visits from another device, visits another site, or returns the next day.

No cookies and other persistent identifiers

We do not use cookies or any other persistent identifiers. We generate a random string of letters and numbers to calculate unique visitors on a given day and reset this string daily.

This makes us compliant with cookie laws and privacy regulations including GDPR, CCPA and PECR.

Here’s an independent legal assessment on GDPR-compliant web analytics without consent written by an experienced data protection expert and lawyer.

By not using cookies, you do not need to obtain consent from visitors to store and retrieve data from their devices. No cookie banner required.

Privacy-first means more complete data, not less

This is the part most people don’t expect. When you use Google Analytics, you need a consent banner. Visitors who decline it aren’t tracked at all. Depending on your audience, a significant portion of your traffic is simply invisible.

Because Plausible doesn’t use cookies or collect personal data, no consent banner is required. Every visitor is counted. You get a more accurate picture of your traffic, not a filtered one.

You own your website data

When using Plausible, you own and control all of your website data. Even when using our hosted service, you remain completely in control. You can delete everything we have collected about your site at any time.

Your data is never sold, shared or used for ads

Plausible is funded entirely by subscribers. We don’t sell your data, show ads or share visitor information with third parties. Your data is never monetized or used for behavioral profiling.

Because we don’t make money from tracking people, we charge a fee instead. That’s what keeps the project running and lets us focus entirely on building a better product for our customers.

You can self-host Plausible Analytics

Plausible is open source and you can self-host it on your own server. The cloud version we manage for you. The self-hosted version you install, maintain and manage yourself.

You can see all the differences here.

Give Plausible a try

Hugging Face, Ghost, Basecamp, Harvard and thousands of other sites trust Plausible with their analytics. You can try it free for 30 days with no credit card required. See pricing or start your free trial.

Setup takes a few minutes. Add a single script tag to your site and you’re collecting data. You can run Plausible alongside your current analytics provider and only remove the other script once you’re happy with what Plausible provides.