Plausible Analytics VS GoAccess

There was a time when open source software meant “functional, but clunky.” That’s changed. Tools like Plausible (analytics), N8N (automation), Umami (web stats), and Vaultwarden (password manager) are beautifully built, stable, and powerful. Many match or even beat their commercial alternatives.

Plausible is a privacy-focused website analytics tool that provides simple, actionable insights into website traffic and visitor behavior. It prioritizes data privacy by offering transparent analytics without cookies, tracking scripts, or personal data collection.

Perfect for companies running under tight EU privacy regulations. Find more: Plausible analytics

In this interview, Marko Saric shared his thoughts on privacy and running a bootstrapped SaaS business. Plausible integration is already available in Open SaaS as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We hope this interview helps you understand the value of such a product, and the nature of running an open source business.

Plausible Analytics (https://plausible.io/) is a lightweight, privacy-focused analytics tool that’s designed to be simple and easy to use. Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible gives you just the metrics you need—without the bloat.

Would this also work with something like Plausible (https://github.com/plausible/analytics) which uses ClickHouse to store web analytics data, or it primarily for log data?

I've actually had this discussion with Plausible directly back in 2022[1], and more recently with the lawyer they had write a blog post on the topic[2]. I wrote an article on it, that was recently discussed here on HN [3].

The response from Plausible is essentially "we've checked with legal council, and stand by the statement". The conversation with the lawyer started out well, but he stopped responding when I asked about the ePD, not GDPR.

There generally seems to be a lot of confusion, even in legal circles, about what ePD requires informed consent for. Many think that only PII requires consent, or think that anonymization bypasses it. That amount of confusion makes it very easy for a layman (e.g. Plausible) to find _someone_ willing to back up their viewpoint.

The EDPB released a guideline in 2023 that explicitly states that what Plausible et al. are doing is covered by the ePD's consent requirement, but that doesn't mean that any of the companies offering it are interested in saying it out loud.

1: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963

I use https://goaccess.io/ to parse the logs and generate a html report.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there is a lot of bot activity there, that using JS might cleanup a bit.

If you are interested, I have a write up of my setup here, with the report generation down at the bottom:

11. I use goaccess (https://goaccess.io) to look at my server logs and see what is hitting me.

GoAccess looks interesting; to be sincere, I haven't used it myself, but the demo website looks extremely fascinating to me! https://goaccess.io/

But how about if we want to analyze the access.log file as a single report? I found goaccess can help to the rescue. So here is how I used this tool to generate a report.

Goaccess (https://github.com/allinurl/goaccess) does this in real time and has been very stable for well over a decade.

GitHub: GoAccess GitHub Repository

Not forgotten by any means but goaccess is nice and simple to use

https://goaccess.io/

If one wants server-side metrics with a little more info than the author's "hacky little script", there's always goaccess [1], which functions in broadly the same way. I even use it with Firebase Hosting-hosted sites via [2] (which I wrote).

[1] http://goaccess.io/

[2] https://github.com/Silicon-Ally/gcp-clf

> Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake.

GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/

Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing.

That said, I'd still say that the analytics solutions out there, especially self-hostable ones like Matomo, are quite nice and can have both UIs that are very easy to interact with for the average person (e.g. filtering data by date range, or by page/view that was interacted with), as well as have a plethora of different datasets: https://matomo.org/features/

I think it can be useful to have a look at what sorts of devices are mostly being used to interact with your site, what operating systems and browsers are in use, how people navigate through the site, where do they enter the site from and how they find it, what the front end performance is like, or even how your e-commerce site is doing, at a glance, in addition to seeing how this changes over time.

People have also said good things about Plausible Analytics as well: https://plausible.io/

Maybe, if it's just local and need just information, maybe https://goaccess.io is an option.