Plausible Analytics VS Shynet

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

can we compare it with Shynet? https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

Shynet is similarly self hostable, and has a tiny footprint..

+1 on shynet! I use it for my personal website and my blog, and it's been working great.

I got it up and running with Podman, so no need to install and run the Docker daemon. I also fixed SQLite support [1], so no need for an additional DB server.

I analyzed available open-source web analytics tools [2] and AFAIK there is simpler solution for web analytics that doesn't involve a third party.

[1] https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet/issues/208

[2] https://blog.fidelramos.net/software/privacy-respecting-self...

I like shynet

I am using shynet for a while now. Really all I need to know :)

https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

There's also Shynet.

Oh that is actually shynet self hosted analytics which is privacy friendly. https://github.com/milesmcc/shynet

But I think I'll just remove it for now.