// the find
plausible/analytics
Open source, privacy-first web analytics. Lightweight, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative. Self-hosted or cloud.
Plausible is a privacy-first web analytics platform that replaces Google Analytics with a cookie-free, GDPR-compliant alternative. It's built on Elixir/Phoenix with ClickHouse for the analytics query layer and PostgreSQL for everything else. The target is anyone who wants real traffic data without becoming a surveillance participant.
The dual-database architecture is the right call — ClickHouse handles the append-heavy analytics workload far better than Postgres ever would at scale. The tracker script is genuinely tiny (under 1KB) and ships under MIT so you can include it without AGPL contamination on your site. The codebase separates CE vs. cloud features cleanly via an `extra/` directory, which is an honest way to run open core without poisoning the community build. The test suite includes Playwright e2e alongside unit tests, and the CI matrix covers migrations validation separately — that's the kind of discipline that prevents the 'tests pass, prod breaks' failure mode.
The Community Edition is deliberately crippled: no funnels, no revenue goals, no SSO, and only two releases per year. If you self-host expecting feature parity with the cloud product, you'll be disappointed and six months behind. Bot filtering in CE is basic — cloud gets 32K datacenter IP ranges excluded; CE gets User-Agent string matching. That gap will quietly inflate your self-hosted numbers. The Elixir + ClickHouse stack is powerful but narrows the contributor pool significantly; most web developers won't touch it. The React frontend is also mid-migration — there's a mix of `.js` and `.tsx` files with `*-legacy` variants scattered throughout, suggesting a long-running refactor that never quite finished.