website VS Plausible Analytics

Plausible - Open Source Alternative to Google Analytics

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

The analytics provider I've gone with is Plausible. Sadly it's not free - about $9 a month - but it's easy to use, lightweight (the script is less than 1kb), and respects privacy, so it's worth a look IMO.

Plausible

Or you need to use some other static site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.

Something very simple, but yet so difficult.

I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly read operation, but they are officially dropping support for production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was, that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.

There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and also fully GDPR compliant: https://plausible.io/

For those who look for an alternative https://plausible.io is a great replacement.

I am using a self-hosted Plausible [1] instance, which is GDPR-compliant out of the box with no cookies required. I am super happy with it. The only downside is that you need to run Postgres and Clickhouse which is overkill for my small sites (an option that only uses SQLite would be great). I don't want to track my users. I just want to see which pages get traffic. Sometimes I am also curious about where visitors come from (by country) and what devices they are using.

In a newer update, they allow region tracking based on cities. I think this is too much information. I did not enable this and hope they won't add other more intrusive features.

[1] https://plausible.io/

Without analytics it's like walking in the dark without any light. We need to track visits, visits duration, users behavior and so on so forth. Nowadays, before reading something online, you need to give access (deny if they let you) to cookies, privacy policies, TOS, newsletter signups…. I just want to read a few interesting paragraphs, I don't want to buy a car! That's where Plausible comes in. Let's explore why it rocks:

I self-host Plausible to do this for my projects. If you want an example, I make my analytics open here.