Plausible Analytics VS Shynet

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.

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.