Plausible charges $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews and climbs from there. For a hobby blog that’s fine. For a SaaS doing 500,000 pageviews a month, you’re looking at $69 monthly for a dashboard that still won’t tell you which visitors turned into paying customers.
That gap is where most people start shopping around. The tools below are the ones worth your time, ranked by how much they give you beyond what Plausible already does.
1. PrettyInsights
PrettyInsights is built for SaaS founders and app owners, and that focus shows. It does the same cookieless, GDPR-safe visitor tracking as Plausible, but then it connects to Stripe and other payment gateways so you can see revenue next to traffic in the same dashboard.
That’s the piece Plausible has never really solved. You can set up custom goals there, sure, but watching a “signup” event fire is not the same as knowing a visitor from Hacker News paid $49 last Tuesday.
A few things I liked when testing it:
- Real-time view that actually updates without a refresh
- Multi-site management from one account, handy if you run three or four small products
- Scheduled email reports, so you don’t have to log in every Monday
- WordPress and Shopify plugins for people who don’t want to touch a script tag
- E-commerce tracking for product views, purchases, and revenue
- comes with product analytics capability similar to PostHog
Pricing runs from a free tier up to around $280 a month, with the lower plans starting near $10 for 20,000 events a month. For a solo founder or a small team that cares about money in, not just pageviews, it’s the strongest option on this list. If you run a content site with no checkout, half of its best features will sit unused.
2. Fathom Analytics
Fathom is the closest like-for-like swap. Same privacy stance, same one-page dashboard, same “we don’t need a cookie banner” pitch. It starts at $15 a month for 100,000 pageviews, which is cheaper than Plausible once you pass 10,000.
Two differences matter. Fathom keeps your data forever on every plan, and its uptime monitoring is included at no extra cost. Neither is exciting, but both are the sort of thing you notice six months in.
The company is smaller and moves slower on new features. And there’s no self-hosted option at all, so if that’s why you’re leaving Plausible, skip ahead.
3. Umami
Umami is open source, MIT licensed, and self-hosts on a $5 VPS or a free Vercel deployment with a Postgres database. It’s what a lot of developers reach for after they get annoyed at paying for something they could run themselves.
The dashboard looks a lot like Plausible’s. Pageviews, referrers, countries, devices, custom events. It handles multiple websites and has a team feature for shared access.
What you give up is polish and support. Updates occasionally break things, and you’re the one debugging it at 11pm. There’s a hosted Umami Cloud now, starting free and moving to $20 a month, if you’d rather not deal with that.
4. Matomo
Matomo has been around since 2007 (it used to be called Piwik) and is the most feature-heavy tool here by a wide margin. Heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, A/B testing, ecommerce reports, a tag manager. Basically everything Google Analytics did before GA4 made it miserable.
Self-hosting is free under the GPL. The cloud version starts at €19 a month for 50,000 hits.
The trade-off is weight. The interface is dense, the tracking script is heavier than Plausible’s 1KB, and you’ll spend a weekend configuring it properly. Good fit for a marketing team of five that misses Universal Analytics. Overkill for a personal site.
5. PostHog
PostHog is a product analytics platform first and a web analytics tool second, but the web analytics module added in 2023 is now decent enough to replace Plausible on its own. You get the standard traffic dashboard, plus:
- Session replays
- Feature flags
- Funnels and retention charts
- Surveys
- A generous free tier (1 million events a month)
For an early-stage product team that wants to understand what users do after they land, it’s hard to beat. For a blog, it’s absurd. The free tier is genuinely large, but the pricing beyond it is usage-based and can get confusing if you turn on every module.
6. Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is Dutch, EU-hosted, and about as minimal as this category gets. One page, no cookies, no personal data collected at all. It also runs a “Twitter (X) referrer” feature that shows which specific tweets sent you traffic, which is more useful than it sounds.
It costs $19 a month, which is more than Plausible for the same 100,000 pageviews. The main reason to pick it is the EU data residency if you’re a European company that wants that box ticked without thinking about it. Otherwise, Fathom does roughly the same job for less.
Which one to actually pick
If revenue matters, PrettyInsights. If you want the cheapest privacy-friendly swap with no setup, Fathom. If you’d rather self-host and can tolerate the occasional broken update, Umami.
Matomo and PostHog are only worth it if you’ll use the extra features. Most people say they will and then look at the pageviews chart anyway.
