Analytics and monitoring decision
Plausible
Plausible is open source (https://github.com/plausible/analytics) so a technical user can self-host the core analytics stack; however the public SaaS provides proven large-scale hosting, SLA/managed features and enterprise convenience you’d lose when self-hosting.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Plausible alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Collect pageview and event hits from a small JS tracking snippet, persist events, run simple aggregations, and present results on a dashboard.
What it still won’t have
- Managed hosting, uptime SLA and operational scaling
- Managed backups and incident response
- Hosted integrations and built-in managed exports at scale
- Priority support and enterprise features (SSO, managed proxy) unless self-implemented
What remains hard
- Infrastructure at scale
Plausible runs reliably at any scale, from small sites to hundreds of millions of monthly visitors, and is trusted by thousands of companies that have switched from Google Analytics.
- Brand trust
We’re massive users of Plausible here at Hugging Face.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted Plausible-compatible analytics stack using Docker Compose (Postgres, Redis, web app) and an Nginx reverse proxy with Let's Encrypt. Implement: 1) an Events API endpoint that validates the Plausible tracking payload and stores raw events in Postgres; 2) background aggregation jobs to compute daily/hourly metrics; 3) a small React or Vue SPA dashboard that queries aggregated metrics and shows realtime visitors; 4) a minimal import/export (CSV) and backup/restore procedure; 5) provisioning scripts and systemd timers for backups. Out of scope: global multi-region autoscaling, enterprise SSO, managed SLA. Include logging, error handling, health checks, DB migrations, basic tests for API ingestion and aggregation, and a README with deployment steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Self-host verdict base92
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Hard moats found in the evidence-3
- Evidence score99
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productPlausible homepage
- official docsPlausible documentation
- open sourceumami-software/umami
- open sourceplausible/analytics
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
