Compare·Plausible

Made for privacy, but it has limits.

Plausible has the cleanest privacy story in analytics, and it is simple on purpose. But it is built never to recognise a returning person, so it cannot tell you whether anyone came back.

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What Plausible is

A lightweight, open-source, cookieless web analytics tool with an EU-hosted cloud and a self-host option.

Licence: Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Hosting: EU cloud or self-host
Best at: Being fully cookieless and EU-hosted, with a script too small for anyone to worry about.

Where Plausible wins.

If one of these is a must-have for you, go with them.

Cookieless with nothing to switch on

Their tracker has one mode, and it stores nothing, so there is no setting to get wrong or forget. We default to one first-party cookie and make cookieless a per-project switch. Someone has to turn it on, and remember that they did.

Open source and self-hostable

You can read the code and run it on your own infrastructure. We are a hosted product and closed source. If you need to own the stack, we are not an option.

A smaller script

Their tracker is famously tiny. Ours does more and weighs more; if every kilobyte in the head is contested, that matters.

Where Spreelytics wins.

Every line here is a page in the product today.

It can follow a person

By default an anonymous visitor gets a stable identity and a full history, which is what makes retention, cohorts and one-person timelines possible. Their design rules that out for good. Ours rules it out only on projects you switch to cookieless, and only for people you have not identified. You make that choice per site.

Web and product analytics

Segments with retention grids, one timeline per person, and dashboards you build from your own saved reports. These answer different questions from "how much traffic did we get".

Revenue and attribution

Payments from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy, traced by last-touch or linear attribution over a window you set, on every plan including Free. Their revenue goals, on the Business plan, credit the source of the visit that paid.

Crawlers and AI agents

We track bots and AI crawlers server-side, and your agent can query and build on our hosted MCP endpoint. Plausible drops bot traffic unseen, and its docs point to a community MCP server rather than one of its own.

Side by side.

We leave prices out because Plausible can change theirs at any time. Ours are on the pricing page.

Spreelytics compared with Plausible, feature by feature
Feature	Spreelytics	Plausible
Free tier	100k events / month, 13 months of data	Trial, then paid
Data sampling	Never sampled	Sampled above 10M pageviews
Cookies	One first-party cookie, or cookieless	None
Open source	Not included	Included
Self-hosting	Not included	Included
Funnels	Included	Included
Retention and cohorts	Included	Not included
Path analysis / journeys	Included	User journeys (Business plan)
Person-level timelines	Included	Not included
Revenue attribution you control	Last-touch or linear	Revenue by source, no model
AI crawler and bot traffic	Included	Not included
MCP access for AI agents	Included	Community MCP only
Session replay	On Growth	Not included
Feature flags and experiments	Not included	Not included

Moving over.

Every one of these starts by leaving Plausible running.

Run both for a fortnight

Two scripts, no cutover. Their numbers and ours will differ slightly and you should see by how much before deciding.

Recreate your goals

Anything you had as a Plausible goal is an event or a page here. For the money, connect your payment provider rather than sending amounts from the page.

Ask the questions you could not

Try weekly retention for a segment, one person’s whole timeline, and revenue split across every visit that led to it.

FAQ

Switching from Plausible.

What people ask before they switch.

Is Spreelytics cookieless like Plausible?

It can be, but not by default and not in the same shape. Out of the box we set one first-party cookie (365 days) so a returning visitor is recognised as the same person, because that cookie is what makes retention, cohorts and person timelines possible.

There is a cookieless mode you switch on per project, and it stores nothing in the browser: no cookie, local storage or session storage. The snippet stays the same. It has the same costs as their design. An anonymous visitor counts as new every day, and retention then counts identified people only.

Plausible has no cookie mode at all, so nobody can turn one on by accident. Ours is a switch, and a switch can be left in the wrong position. If that matters more to you than retention does, they are the better fit.

Do I need a consent banner either way?

That depends on your jurisdiction and everything else you collect. We will not claim you can skip it, in either of our modes. Their single no-cookie design makes their side of that conversation shorter than ours, because there is only one thing to describe.

Can I self-host Spreelytics?

No. We are a hosted product. Plausible and Matomo are the options if self-hosting is what you are shopping for.

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