Show HN: Plausible – Self-Hosted Google Analytics alternative

Hello HN!<p>We started developing Plausible early last year, launched our SaaS business and you can now self-host Plausible on your server too! The project is battle-tested running on more than 5,000 sites and we’ve counted 180 million page views in the last three months.<p>Plausible is a standard Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix application backed by a PostgreSQL database for general data and a Clickhouse database for stats. On the frontend we use TailwindCSS for styling and React to make the dashboard interactive.<p>The script is lightweight at 0.7 KB. Cookies are not used and no personal data is collected. There’s no cross-site or cross-device tracking either.<p>We build everything in the open with a public roadmap so would love to hear your feedback and feature requests. Thank you!

Plausible is a gulp of fresh air in the sea of products and services that try to sell one&#x27;s identity in exchange for a free service. I have started using it for one of my sites, then recently migrated another, and planning to do the same with the rest of my projects.<p>Moreover, Plausible being an open-source product, it gives anyone a chance to contribute to it and make it even better. As soon as I realised that it was written in Elixir&#x2F;Phoenix, I just couldn&#x27;t wait but find ways to help. Although my contributions to the project have been small until now, the guys were really kind and addressed the changes I pointed out almost immediately.<p>Great work!

Plausible Analytics [1] is an MIT Licensed alternative to Google Analytics. It is hosted at plausible.io but can also be self-hosted. The app server is written in Phoenix&#x2F;Elixir. The self-hosted version is distributed as a Docker image. It is configured [2] with a PostgreSQL server for user data, a Clickhouse server for analytics data, and an SMTP server for transactional email.<p>EDIT: according to markosaric, the data policy restricts the granularity of Active Users [3] to daily statistics for privacy reasons so the common Monthly Active Users (MAU) stat is not available.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plausible&#x2F;analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plausible&#x2F;analytics</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.plausible.io&#x2F;self-hosting-configuration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.plausible.io&#x2F;self-hosting-configuration</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Active_users" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Active_users</a>

I have lost count of all the Google Analytics alternatives. It seems there is a new one popping up every week. This is not criticism, but I&#x27;m wondering why there are so many people developing their own alternative product.<p>For me an attractive GA alternative has to be:<p>- 100% self hosted via Docker containers in Kubernetes - Able to configure a connection string to a datastore outside my kubes cluster - One deployment for the data gathering service - Second deployment for an Admin tool&#x2F;dashboard - Provide at least basic metrics around acquisition, user device and location data<p>Nice to have:<p>- Open source so people can scrutinise the code before deploying and feed back bug fixes&#x2F;feature requests, etc.<p>Can anyone recommend a GA alternative which ticks these boxes?

This comes very close to GA alternative, it&#x27;s nice and fat free. The daily salt reset is a deal breaker. (basically means people visiting the site are considered unique everyday which breaks monthly&#x2F;weekly unique stats and conversion tracking spanning more than 24 hours)<p>Our current pipeline for one app has a 14-20 days conversion and we rely on this data to optimize. Also have an marketplace app where conversions periods spans several days depending on the product and promotions. With the daily anonymization algorithm reset, every conversion will seem it took less than 24 hours.<p>The hunt for a GA alternative continues. BTW does anyone know&#x2F;recommend a great self hosted alternative to Mixpanel?

There was an interview on Changelog earlier this year with these guys, it was pretty interesting to hear how they work and got started, etc...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;396" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;396</a>

Plausible is not a Google Analytics alternative. Yes, it shows you traffic on pages, but it does not support some essential features, like proper events&#x2F;goals with metadata.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plausible&#x2F;analytics&#x2F;issues&#x2F;134" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plausible&#x2F;analytics&#x2F;issues&#x2F;134</a>

This seems to have the same issue as Pirsch[0] in that (i) a mobile user will have multiple IPs during a day as they roam between wifi networks and mobile networks - which will incorrectly over-report unique visitors and (ii) NAT gateways with similar devices behind (a home with 4 iPhones, a workplace with 5000 identically imaged desktops, all similar devices at a starbucks, an entire lab of computers at a school) will incorrectly under-report unique users.<p>An IPv4 address is an unreliable way to count &quot;a visitor&quot;. At best it represents &quot;at least one network (~building) of 1-n visitors&quot;. You could argue 0-n visitors (some sort of automation&#x2F;crawler). It could also represent more than one network (a temporary IP obtained for less than a day, a IP obtained for a day that changes during your definition of a day).<p>User-agent reduces the scope, but doesn&#x27;t eliminate (between recommended evergreen updates and identically imaged&#x2F;uncustomized use of devices).<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23668212" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23668212</a>

Plausible is the best thing that has happened to us at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellonext.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hellonext.co</a>. Such a beautiful product, and has helped us get more customers from the EU as well, since they know that we are not really in the business of helping other companies track them and push ads down their browsers.

It would be nice to see how it compares to other products. Lately I&#x27;ve been noticing quite a few GA alternatives, would be nice to know which one is really worth looking into.

Somewhat related, I have a list of privacy friendly Google-Analytics alternatives at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workflowy.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;analytics-software&#x2F;0yDQ899MfOsE2WAO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workflowy.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;analytics-software&#x2F;0yDQ899MfOsE2WAO</a>

As an outsider of web-backends, is Google Analytics used as a web-service api for doing analytics on your own website? and now with Plausible you can install an analytics engine on your own website&#x2F;webserver and use it &quot;natively&quot; instead of relying on a big-tech service api?<p>Is that what&#x27;s going on? if yes, are big-tech service-api&#x27;s so popular that indie web-backend engineers use them all over the place? My impression was that most of the backend stuff you do is on the webserver, and part of the work is to survey github open-source projects and install the ones you like (and the ones that are popular) on your webserver.<p>Wasn&#x27;t the community shift from php to node.js&#x2F;npm (or ruby, or python, take your pick) touted as some kind of a mini-revolution, something that&#x27;ll make your life easier as a backend-dev? Turns out you guys still prefer someone else (in this case, 4-eyes big-tech) does the serious work for you?<p>I&#x27;m really not sure I understand the landscape.

Been using Plausible since I started working on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;btfy.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;btfy.io</a>. I actually copied their algorithm to detect unique visitors for Btfy also. Really great work. Will be open-sourcing mine too soon.

At first glance the design of this feels very close to fathom, another privacy-focused analytics tool <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usefathom.com&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goaccess.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goaccess.io&#x2F;</a> does the same analytics and does not require exposing a dedicated service

I wanted to support and use Plausible, mainly for the drill-down feature, which Fathom doesn&#x27;t have yet.<p>But, I had two main concerns about this product from my trial:<p>1) Slow response time (~300ms) of the script when using a custom domain.<p>2) I liked its simple design and features, but looks like it&#x27;s already starting to bloat up with trivial things like UTM tracking.<p>Some small UI bugs (like time range buttons not working) also need ironing out.<p>Waiting for Cloudflare Web Analytics to compare.

Anyone else getting an error in Safari when trying to visit the site?<p>&quot;Safari can&#x27;t open the page &#x27;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;self-hsted-web-analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;self-hsted-web-analytics</a>&quot; because Safari can&#x27;t establish a secure connection to the server &#x27;plausible.io&#x27;.

It would be nice if projects like this had a page explaining why you would choose them over the 20 other[0] open source analytics options.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awesome-selfhosted&#x2F;awesome-selfhosted#analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;awesome-selfhosted&#x2F;awesome-selfhosted#ana...</a>

I wish there were an ethical, FOSS analytics with cross-site interest tracking. As a Games as a Service developer, I need to be able to know my audience characteristics (such as age) that help me understand where to further develop the product. It could give the user the choice of what information to share and use diffe

Does anyone know if they are using a stock theme?<p>I really like the design (and structure) of their website. Or was the design self-made?

Why use Plausible rather than Snowplow?

Notice to the authors: it looks like you&#x27;ve built this using taulwindui components (which are great!). I don&#x27;t think though that their license allows them to be used in open source projects.

Link to free, self-hosted version: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;self-hosted-web-analytics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plausible.io&#x2F;self-hosted-web-analytics</a>

I would love to hear this compares to Posthog!<p>I just switched from Google Analytics (by way of firebase) to Posthog, which seems very comparable. I liked Posthog because it has a react native library.

Any way to run this on a shared hosting with PHP&#x2F;MySQL? If that works out somehow I would give this a try over Matomo, which is just &quot;too big&quot; for my use case.

Excited to see support for hash-based routes got added recently! That was the major deterrent for me last time I saw this posted, time to give it another shot I think.

+1 from a two-months user. Haven&#x27;t had the time to mess around with Umami so I jumped on it. UI needs some polish, otherwise a solid alternative.

Nice product but the fact you can&#x27;t tell new from old customers is a non-starter for most businesses.

Is there info about what pages a user viewed and the browser version? I don&#x27;t see it on the demo.

I&#x27;m really wondering how can it identify returning visitor without using cookies. Local storage?