Plausible Analytics VS PostHog

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

Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review.

Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2].

Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3]

On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4]

Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge.

For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product.

[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h...

[2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s...

[3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

[4] https://ahrefs.com/

I'm unable to see their website

https://posthog.com

Is it just me?

Website link: PostHog

Send events to analytics tools like PostHog.

For SaaS startups looking for a powerful, privacy-conscious analytics platform, PostHog provides an all-in-one solution designed for modern product teams.

The next rung up are User recordings. For users that are having issues, we have concrete recorded data for their flow. The flows would include anything relevant to the application, how they used it, what actions they took. All so we can actually see what happened in context for when there is a problem. No one wants to spend any time looking at recordings if they don't have to. It is also very difficult to identify the root cause of problems by reviewing a recording, but having them is indispensable to your support engineers when they need them, when a user has reported a issue. Solutions include PostHog, FullStory, Sentry. If you don't have these recordings, then the next best alternative (which is very far away) is getting a live screencast from the user. These are less useful, and more expensive to obtain. Worst of all, they can and have been used to breach sensitive systems.

Posthog. Posthog has a lot of sub products but I use it mainly for analytics and session replays. I have to say Posthog is an impressive product. Everything from dev experience to dashboards is just awesome. Great to see GA finally got some real competition. I'm looking forward to try all the other products from them.

Visit Posthog Website and signup to create your account using either email, google, or github etc.

We use tools like Posthog to measure how users are using our products. This allows us to see what features are being used and which ones are not.