Plausible Analytics VS PostHog

Also a small tooling aside — if you're tracking how often skills get used across your team (or just want analytics on your dev blog without the GDPR cookie banner dance), privacy-focused options like Umami or Plausible give you full data ownership and a much lighter footprint than Google Analytics. I migrated two side projects to Umami last year and haven't looked back.

So this post is about something I've been chewing on for months but finally moved on: ripping Google Analytics out of three side projects and picking a privacy-focused alternative. Specifically, I'll compare Umami, Plausible, and Fathom — the three I actually evaluated — and walk through the migration steps that worked for me.

Here's something better than that:

https://github.com/plausible/analytics

Elixir.

Plausible is what I recommend when someone wants to set it up and forget about it. It's an EU-based company, the data stays in the EU, and they're very transparent about their infrastructure.

Plausible is also open-source with a self-hosted option, but their cloud-hosted product is where most people land. It's polished, opinionated, and genuinely pleasant to use.

I've been using Umami for this — it's a self-hosted, privacy-focused analytics tool that doesn't require cookie banners and is fully GDPR-compliant out of the box. Compared to alternatives like Plausible (also excellent, but their hosted plan costs more) or Fathom (hosted-only, pricier), Umami hits a sweet spot of simplicity and zero cost if you self-host. You get clean dashboards showing endpoint usage, response times, and user patterns without shipping data to third parties.

If you want lightweight analytics, use privacy-respecting tools and keep them optional. For example, Plausible (https://plausible.io/) is a common choice for simple, cookie-light analytics.

Plausible is similar in philosophy but offers a hosted option if you don't want to manage infrastructure. It's also open source and GDPR compliant without cookies.

Hey HN.

Long-time lurker (2017) here, but finally something to post about.

I've been building an iOS companion app for Plausible over the past few months. There are some great ones out there already, but I have always wanted to try building an app first-hand. I'm quite proud of the end result, so I wanted to share it online to see if people would be interested in using it.

In case you don't know: Plausible Analytics (https://plausible.io/) is a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. You can self-host it or choose to use their SaaS platform.

I chose Plausible Analytics because of their business philosophy: Privacy should come first. Arbory is built to connect directly to Plausible (either SaaS or self-hosted).

Features include:

* iOS Liquid Glass-native dashboard displaying most of your website analytics.

This is the same model that PostHog, Supabase, and dozens of other developer tools use. Open core, with a managed offering on top.

Offchain: Website traffic, in-app behaviour, marketing channels, growth campaigns (Google Analytics or PostHog).

Topic PostHog (Web Vitals) Apogee Watcher Primary job Product analytics OS; Web Vitals are real-user metrics from the browser Synthetic PageSpeed monitoring + CrUX in results Instrumentation Requires posthog-js on the site No script on monitored sites Metrics FCP, LCP, INP, CLS from real sessions ($web\_vitals) when capture runs Lighthouse lab + CrUX (where available) via PSI Cookieless analytics With always (and cookieless paths without session IDs), $web\_vitals does not populate—see Cookieless mode above No snippet; tests do not use PostHog session state Best for “How do my users experience my app?” “How are these URLs doing on a schedule—and across many clients?” Multi-site agency Analytics projects and teams—not Watcher’s org/site/page model Multi-tenant orgs, roles, discovery, budgets Budgets & email alerts Insight-based—build trends from $web\_vitals, attach [alerts](https://posthog.com/docs/alerts) with thresholds, frequency, destinations; maintain as analytics evolves Monitoring-native—performance budgets and email alerts tied to scheduled tests; no separate insight to curate first Extras Flags, replay, experiments, cohorts, warehouse pipelines PDF-style reporting direction, Leads prospecting workflows Cost shape Event-based (vitals count toward event quotas) Plan-based subscription; PSI quota bundled—verify [pricing](https://apogeewatcher.com/pricing)

PostHog provides an open-source analytics approach, giving teams flexibility to customize dashboards, session recordings, and heatmaps.

Originally built for Web2, PostHog can be extended with Web3 event tracking through custom data pipelines. Key features of Posthog are funnels, session recordings, feature flags, open-source & self-hosted

A big thanks to PostHog who pioneered this approach with HogQL, a SQL-like interface on top of ClickHouse. TRQL started as a TypeScript conversion of their Python implementation but evolved significantly during development to handle our specific use cases.

Plausible brought open source to web analytics. Cal.com did it for scheduling. Formbricks did it for surveys. PostHog did it for product analytics. Quackback does it for feedback collection.