Plausible alternatives: where to go, and how to take your data with you
Six tools and one self-hosted option, sorted by why you're leaving, plus an eight-step exit plan.
The short answer: go with Fathom if you want the same privacy-first approach at a lower price once traffic grows or you run several sites. Pick Pirsch if your Plausible history has to come along. Umami is the free route, Matomo is for when Plausible feels too thin for your marketing, and PostHog is for when you need per-user tracking and product analytics. If you like the tool but not the subscription, Plausible's Community Edition runs free on your own server.
One thing to know before you pick: Plausible's full export lives in your site settings, broken down by day, and it leaves out anything you imported from Google Analytics. Run it before you cancel. We compared all seven options, their entry prices and their import paths in 2026.
Our ranking is editorial: a sponsored spot is always labeled on its card, and no affiliate link changes a score.
Why people end up leaving Plausible
Nobody leaves Plausible because it's a bad product. The script is light, the dashboard fits on one screen, and the data stays in the EU. People leave because of how the price scales, what's missing, and what happens when they self-host to save money.
The price tracks your traffic and your site count
Starter is $9 a month, but that's one site and up to 10k monthly pageviews. Growth ($14) covers three sites, Business ($19) covers ten, and every traffic tier above that raises the price. Run five small sites and you're already on Business. Fathom includes 50 sites from $15, Pirsch 50 sites from $6.
Two months over your tier and the dashboard locks
A one-off spike never costs extra. Stay above your tier two months in a row, though, and Plausible asks you to upgrade. If you don't within a week, your dashboards are locked until you do. Tracking keeps running, so no data is lost. You just can't see it.
No free hosted plan
Plausible calls itself a paid hosted service. You get a 30-day trial with no card, then billing starts. For a side project with a few hundred visits a month, that's the complaint you see most in forums: people like the product but can't justify the monthly fee. Some developers even go back to Google Analytics for that reason alone.
The advanced features sit at the top of the price list
Funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue, custom properties and the Stats API only come with Business ($19): Starter and Growth don't have them. SSO and the Sites API are Enterprise only, priced on request. And the free self-hosted edition ships without funnels, user journeys, revenue goals or SSO.
No sessions, no profiles, no heatmaps
That's by design: Plausible doesn't record individual sessions and keeps no visitor profiles. It points you to session replay tools for that, and to Mixpanel or PostHog for product analytics. If what you need has drifted toward product questions or heatmaps, it's no longer the right tool. It's also not HIPAA-compliant, which rules it out for some US health sites.
Self-hosted, bots inflate your numbers
The cloud version blocks around 32,000 data center IP ranges and runs an algorithm against non-human traffic. Community Edition only has basic filtering (user agent and referrer spam). One self-hoster watched roughly 200 daily unique visitors turn into 5,000+. At that point, the charts stop describing people.
You're leaving because… go with…
The right Plausible alternative depends on what's pushing you out. Usually only one row applies. Each card jumps to the full write-up below.
$15/mo for up to 100k pageviews, with at least 50 sites included.
You want your history in the new toolPirschIt imports a Plausible export from its own import screen.
You don't want to pay at allUmami100k free events in the cloud, or self-hosted with nothing held back.
Plausible is too thin for your marketingMatomoSegments, ecommerce, funnels. Cloud in Frankfurt or free on your server.
You need per-user trackingPostHogIndividual sessions and product analytics, 1M free events a month.
You like the tool, not the subscriptionPlausible CEThe free self-hosted edition, with fewer features and bots to filter yourself.
Plausible alternatives, one by one
For each tool: why switch to it, who it's for (and who it isn't), its catch, how to bring your history over, and what it costs to start. Prices are what each vendor lists in 2026.
Fathom: same idea, a much wider price tier
Closest match, cheaper at scaleWhy switch to Fathom. It's the closest thing to Plausible: paid, focused on audience numbers, no free plan. The difference is the pricing ladder. The first plan, $15 a month, covers 100k pageviews and at least 50 sites. Then $25 for 200k, $45 for 500k, $60 for 1M, $100 for 2M. On Plausible, $9 buys one site and 10k pageviews.
Who it's for. Agencies, publishers with a portfolio of sites, and anyone past 10k monthly pageviews. Each extra pack of 50 sites is $10 a month.
Who it isn't for. A hobby blog with zero budget. Fathom has no free plan and says so plainly on its pricing page.
The catch. It's closed source and can't be self-hosted. EU Isolation is on by default: personal data from EU visitors is processed in the EU (servers in Germany and Finland), but the anonymized data is stored on US infrastructure. To keep everything in the EU, load the script from the cdn-eu address. Also, events count toward your pageview quota.
How to migrate. Fathom documents no Plausible import, so you start fresh. Keep your CSV export as an archive, rebuild your goals as events, and run both scripts side by side for a few weeks. The trial is 7 days; Fathom asks for a card but doesn't charge it until the trial ends. Fathom also never shuts tracking off over an occasional spike.
- Trial
- 7 days, card required
- Paid
- $15/mo for 100k pageviews
- Sites
- 50 included
- Catch
- no Plausible import
Pirsch: the one tool that imports your Plausible export
Keeps your historyWhy switch to Pirsch. It's the only tool here with a Plausible import built into the product. Export the ZIP of CSV files from Plausible, open Import / Export in Pirsch, find the "Plausible Analytics Import" section and upload. The import runs in the background and you get an email when it's done. Pirsch also imports from Google Analytics and Fathom. Its pricing page doesn't say clearly which plan includes the import, so ask during the trial.
Who it's for. Anyone with years of data who wants unbroken charts. And small budgets: Standard starts at $6 a month (excluding VAT) for 10k pageviews and 50 sites. Plus, at $12, unlocks unlimited sites.
Who it isn't for. A product team that wants individual user journeys. Pirsch is an audience tool, in the same family as Plausible.
The catch. Import files max out at 100 MB, so a bigger archive has to be split. And the quota counts more than pageviews: events and 10% of session extensions are added in. If you track a lot of clicks, size up a tier.
How to migrate. Run the full export from Plausible's settings, check the ZIP size, import, then compare one known month in both tools before cutting over. Data is hosted in Germany and the 30-day trial needs no card.
- Trial
- 30 days, no card
- Paid
- $6/mo excl. VAT, 10k pageviews
- Imports
- Plausible, GA, Fathom
- Catch
- 100 MB max per file
Umami: free in the cloud, or uncapped on your own server
FreeWhy switch to Umami. To stop paying without going back to Google Analytics. The Hobby cloud plan is free up to 100k events a month for one site, with 6 months of retention. The code is open source under the MIT license, so you can also self-host it for free. Here's where it beats Plausible CE: self-hosted Umami keeps sessions, journeys, retention and cohorts, with nothing held back for a paid tier.
Who it's for. Developers, side projects, small teams with a server. It runs on PostgreSQL, which is easy to back up.
Who it isn't for. Anyone who needs their history. Umami imports nothing: no GA, no CSV.
The catch. No Search Console integration, no scroll depth. Bots too: Umami only filters by user agent. A developer who moved from Plausible to Umami had to add a Cloudflare WAF rule to get believable numbers again, and still misses Plausible's cleaner dashboard.
How to migrate. Start fresh. Archive your Plausible export in a spreadsheet, note your monthly benchmarks, and run the Umami script in parallel. If you outgrow the free tier, Pro is $20 a month for 1M events and 20 sites, then $0.03 per 1,000 events. Tracking is never cut off.
- Free
- 100k events/mo in Cloud
- Paid
- Pro $20/mo
- License
- MIT, self-hostable
- Catch
- no history import
Matomo: for when the basics stopped being enough
When Plausible is too thinWhy switch to Matomo. Plausible covers the basics on purpose. People who move to Matomo want what's missing: deeper segments, ecommerce tracking, funnels without paying for the top plan. Matomo comes two ways. Cloud starts at €29 a month (excluding tax) for 50,000 hits, with data stored in Frankfurt. Community, which you install yourself, is free forever, with unlimited users and hits.
Who it's for. Marketing teams, ecommerce sites, and organizations that want everything on their own servers.
Who it isn't for. Anyone who picked Plausible for its single screen. Matomo has more reports and more settings: that's the price of depth.
The catch. There's no documented Plausible import. And self-hosted support runs through the community forum.
How to migrate. Start fresh, and use the move to rethink your tracking plan: goals, events, funnels. The cloud trial needs no card.
- Free
- self-hosted, unlimited
- Paid
- Cloud from €29/mo excl. tax
- Data
- Frankfurt (Cloud)
- Catch
- no Plausible import
Simple Analytics: the most minimal, with a badge-backed free plan
No identifiersWhy switch to Simple Analytics. Same minimalist promise as Plausible, data stored in the EU (main infrastructure in the Netherlands), and a free plan for hobby sites: 5 sites, one user, 30 days of history, with a required badge on your site.
Who it's for. A blog or portfolio that wants simple numbers with no subscription and can live with the badge.
Who it isn't for. A team. Paid starts at $20 a month with one user included, then $20 for each extra user. Three people puts you at $60 a month before you add anything else. Annual billing gives you 2 months free.
The catch. The free plan only keeps the latest month, so it can't double as an archive.
How to migrate. There's no one-click Plausible import, and the vendor says so. The route is to export your Plausible history and contact their support.
- Free
- 5 sites, 30 days of history
- Paid
- from $20/mo
- Data
- Netherlands
- Catch
- $20 per extra user
PostHog: when your questions became product questions
Journeys and sessionsWhy switch to PostHog. Plausible tells you how many people came and from where. It doesn't tell you what a user did inside your app, and it doesn't try to. PostHog does both: web analytics and product analytics on the same meter. The first 1M events a month are free, then $0.00005 per event between 1M and 2M ($50 for an extra million), with the rate dropping at higher volume. EU hosting is available.
Who it's for. SaaS products and apps that need journeys, cohorts and funnels. You can wire it into the rest of your tools with the n8n integration.
Who it isn't for. A brochure site. It's overkill for counting visits. If you're weighing it against Mixpanel, read our Mixpanel review and our product analytics ranking.
The catch. Everything is metered in events. A busy site that tracks every click leaves the free tier fast.
How to migrate. Don't try to rebuild Plausible. Define the five or six actions that matter for your product first, then instrument them. Your Plausible export stays your audience archive.
- Free
- 1M events/mo
- Paid
- usage-based
- Data
- EU hosting available
- Catch
- overkill for a brochure site
Plausible Community Edition: stay on Plausible, on your own server
Stay, minus the billWhy go this way. If price is your only problem, Community Edition is the free, self-hosted, AGPL-licensed release of Plausible. Same interface, same habits. The full settings export uses Plausible's own import format, which makes it the natural way to load your history into your own instance.
Who it's for. A developer or team that already runs a server and knows how to maintain one.
Who it isn't for. Anyone who relies on funnels, user journeys, revenue goals, SSO, the Sites API or the Data Studio connector. None of those ship in CE.
The catch. Three of them. Bots first: filtering is limited to user agents and referrer spam, so your numbers can balloon. Updates next: a long-term release twice a year. Then support: community only. One developer who moved from the cloud to CE to dodge a price increase blames Plausible for stripping core features out of the open source version.
How to migrate. Install CE, import your full export, compare one month, then cancel the cloud plan. Add a firewall rule against bots on day one.
- Free
- yes, self-hosted
- License
- AGPL
- Updates
- two releases a year
- Catch
- weak bot filtering
All 7 options side by side
A quick example: five small sites doing 8,000 pageviews a month between them. On Plausible, Growth stops at three sites, so you're on Business at $19 a month. Fathom costs $15, Pirsch $6 before VAT. Free Umami covers one site, so you'd need Pro at $20 or your own server. Simple Analytics' free plan takes all five, with one month of history and a badge.
| Free tier and entry price | Plausible history and data location | |
|---|---|---|
| PlausibleWhere you're starting | 30-day trial; Starter $9/mo (1 site, 10k pageviews) | Made and hosted in the EU |
| FathomMany sites | No free plan; $15/mo (100k pageviews, 50 sites) | No import; anonymized data stored in the US |
| PirschKeep your history | 30-day trial; $6/mo excl. VAT (10k pageviews, 50 sites) | Native Plausible import; Germany |
| UmamiFree | 100k events in Cloud (1 site); Pro $20/mo | No import; self-hostable (MIT) |
| MatomoMore depth | Free self-hosted; Cloud €29/mo excl. tax (50,000 hits) | No documented import; Frankfurt |
| Simple AnalyticsHobby sites | 5 sites, 30 days, badge; from $20/mo | Import through support; Netherlands |
| PostHogProduct analytics | 1M events/mo; then usage-based | Start fresh; EU hosting available |
| Plausible CEStay put | Free on your own server | Re-import the full export; filter bots yourself |
Entry prices listed by each vendor in 2026, in dollars except Matomo. They change: always check against your real traffic.
Leave Plausible in eight steps
Order matters. The first two steps happen before you cancel anything, because part of the export options go away with your subscription.
List everything running in Plausible
Day 1Write down your sites, goals, custom events, custom properties, team members, shared links, embedded dashboards, and every script that calls the Stats API. One row per item, with its equivalent in the new tool.
That list is what saves you from finding out three weeks later that a client report was showing an embedded Plausible dashboard.
- Time
- about an hour
- Risk if rushed
- a forgotten goal
Run the full export from your site settings
Before you cancelIn site settings, the full export pulls all your stats, day by day, in Plausible's import format. That's your real archive. Do it while your subscription is active: once it ends, dashboard exports and the Stats API stop working, and the settings export only lasts until the account is deleted.
Heads-up: this export skips anything you imported from an outside source like Google Analytics. If you pulled your old GA history into Plausible, keep your original GA export too.
- Includes
- all stats, by day
- Excludes
- imported data
Keep readable summaries with the dashboard export
ExtraThe dashboard export gives you a ZIP of CSVs for the period on screen. Each file keeps only the top 300 entries, and the top 100 for pages and exit pages. It's a summary, not an archive. Use it to keep yearly benchmarks (top pages, sources, countries) in a format anyone can open.
- Limit
- 300 rows, 100 for pages
- Use
- yearly benchmarks
Install the new script next to Plausible
Week 1Don't remove anything yet. Add the new tool's script to every page and let both collect for two to four weeks. Check the pages outside your main theme: thank-you pages, a blog on a subdomain, landing pages.
- Time
- 2 to 4 weeks in parallel
- Check
- subdomains, thank-you pages
Rebuild your goals and events
Week 1Work through your inventory and recreate each goal, keeping only the ones someone actually looks at. On Fathom and Pirsch, events count toward the quota: twenty events on every page can push you into the next tier without any change in traffic.
- Trap
- events eating your quota
Put your history somewhere useful
Week 2Three cases. Moving to Pirsch, you import the Plausible ZIP (split it if a file is over 100 MB). Moving to Community Edition, you import the full export. Moving to Simple Analytics, you go through their support. Anywhere else, keep the CSV archive in a shared spreadsheet, with a tab of monthly totals for year-over-year comparisons.
- Native import
- Pirsch, Plausible CE
- Otherwise
- shared CSV archive
Compare trends, not exact numbers
Weeks 2 to 4No two tools count the same way. Bot filtering changes everything: Plausible's cloud blocks a lot of it, a self-hosted tool far less. Compare trends and the ranking of pages and sources. If the new tool shows several times more visitors, it's almost always bots. Add a firewall rule before you draw conclusions.
- Compare
- trends, top pages, sources
- Red flag
- visitors multiplied
Remove the Plausible script and cancel
End of monthRemove the Plausible script, make sure no page still loads it, then cancel. If you serve EU visitors, also review your consent banner. A cookie-free tool doesn't settle the question by itself: what counts is how it's configured (audience measurement for you alone, anonymous data, no cross-site tracking). Check it again with the new tool.
- Check
- no page loads the script
- Review
- consent banner
Is your tool missing from this page? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
What makes a Plausible exit go wrong
On paper, leaving Plausible means swapping one script. Almost every failed exit comes down to the exports and to comparing numbers the wrong way.
Canceling before exporting
Without an active plan, dashboard exports and the Stats API stop working. The settings export holds until the account is deleted, and no longer. Export first, cancel second.
Mistaking the summary for the archive
The dashboard export cuts off at 300 rows, and 100 for pages. On a site with a thousand posts, you lose the long tail. The archive is the full settings export.
Forgetting your imported GA history
If you imported Google Analytics into Plausible, those years don't come out with the export. Keep your original GA export, or see our guide to switching from Google Analytics.
Trusting the first numbers
A new tool showing twice the visitors hasn't found a hidden audience. It's counting bots Plausible used to drop. Compare trends, filter, then decide.
Ignoring events in the quota
On Fathom and Pirsch, a tracked click counts like a pageview. A site with 80,000 pageviews and 30,000 events is over Fathom's first tier.
Assuming the paperwork is done
Fathom keeps EU visitors' personal data in the EU by default, but stores anonymized data in the US. If your legal team needs everything in the EU, that's a setting to change, not an assumption to make. Plausible itself isn't HIPAA-compliant, so don't assume an alternative is: ask the vendor in writing.
- Inventory of sites, goals, events, members and embedded dashboards
- Full settings export downloaded and opened once
- Original Google Analytics export kept if you had imported it
- New script live on every page, subdomains included
- Goals rebuilt, quota recalculated with events
- History re-imported (Pirsch, CE) or archived in a spreadsheet
- Two to four weeks of parallel tracking compared
- Plausible script removed, consent banner reviewed
Plausible alternatives: common questions
Is there a free version of Plausible?
Not a hosted one. You get a 30-day trial with no card, then Starter is $9 a month (2 months free on annual billing). The only free version is Community Edition, which you run on your own server, without funnels, revenue goals or SSO.
What's the best free Plausible alternative?
Umami, for a single site: its free cloud plan covers 100k events a month with 6 months of retention. For several small sites, Simple Analytics' free plan takes five, but keeps only one month and requires a badge. For an app, PostHog gives you 1M events a month.
What's cheaper than Plausible?
For one small site, Pirsch at $6 (excluding VAT) for 10k pageviews, or Umami's free tier. Across many sites, Fathom often wins, since its $15 plan covers 100k pageviews and 50 sites. Run the math with your events included: both Fathom and Pirsch count them in the quota.
Fathom vs Plausible at high traffic: which costs less?
Fathom publishes its full ladder: $60 for 1M pageviews, $100 for 2M, $200 for 10M. Plausible also prices by traffic tier, starting at $9 for 10k pageviews: set its pricing slider to your real volume and compare line by line.
What happens if you go over your Plausible plan?
A single spike isn't billed. After two straight months above your tier, Plausible asks you to upgrade, prorated. If you don't within a week, the dashboard locks, but tracking continues, so you lose no data.
Self-hosting: Plausible CE or Umami?
Umami, if you want every feature with nothing held back: sessions, journeys and cohorts are included, under MIT, on PostgreSQL. Plausible CE keeps the interface you know, but drops funnels and journeys and ships twice a year. Either way, plan on filtering bots yourself.
Can you export your Plausible data after canceling?
Partly. The full export from site settings works until the account is deleted. Dashboard exports and the Stats API stop without an active plan. Raw event exports on a schedule are an Enterprise feature. The safe move is to export before you cancel.
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One tool to leave, where to go, and how to take your data. That's it.