plausible/analytics

What it does

You add a small script to a website and it starts counting. The report shows visitors, pages, where they came from, which country, and which device, all on one screen. You can set goals, which are the actions that matter — a signup, a purchase, a file downloaded — and see how many visitors completed them. It sends a summary by email or to Slack every week or month. It connects to Google Search Console to show search terms, imports history out of Google Analytics so the numbers do not start from zero, and offers two programming interfaces: one to send events and one to read the statistics back out. It is built from Elixir and Phoenix with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse behind it. What the free version does not include is funnels, revenue goals for online shops, single sign-on, and the interface for managing many sites at once. It also has only basic filtering of automated traffic, no Looker Studio connector, and community-only support. The free edition is published as a long-term release twice a year, so new features arrive there later than on the paid service.

Why it matters

Who it suits. Anyone running a website in a country with strict privacy law who wants numbers without a consent banner, and anyone who finds the mainstream analytics screen too large to read. It fits a blog, a documentation site or a product page especially well, because those need visitor counts and page lists and little else. Skip it if you need funnels or revenue tracking, because those are the paid features and no amount of self-hosting unlocks them.

Verdict. The clearest win on this page, and an hour is an honest estimate for a first site. What makes it recommendable is not only the software but the honesty of the split: the project states on its own page exactly which features the free edition lacks and that the paid service is what funds the work. Two releases a year is slower than most self-hosted projects and that is a deliberate choice, not neglect — code landed the day before this was checked. umami-software/umami at 39,351 stars is the closest alternative and keeps everything in one edition with no feature split, which is the reason to prefer it; Editions 1 and 5 covered it. arp242/goatcounter at 6,029 stars is the much smaller option for one site on a small machine, covered in Edition 30. Check the processor before installing: ClickHouse requires SSE 4.2 or NEON, and 2 GB of memory is the stated minimum.