vs Plausible
We like Plausible. We charge less for the same count.
No cookies, just insights. Made and hosted in the EU. Both products skip cookies. Cookie Free Analytics starts at €4 instead of $9, does not meter events, and publishes the volume curve. Plausible can add “European-owned infrastructure”; we host in EU regions — the split is on /europe.
What they actually are
Plausible is the default privacy analytics recommendation on Hacker News for a reason: open source, EU-hosted, tiny script, a grown-up company. They have ecommerce revenue and a GA import we do not. Funnels: theirs on Business; ours linear and same UTC day on Growth.
When to pick them
You need to self-host the AGPL code, you want ecommerce revenue and a GA import, or you already live in their dashboard. Those are real products. Pick them.
When to pick us
You want the same cookieless pageviews at a lower invoice, events that do not eat the quota, and a published formula. Growth has linear same-day funnels. Their Business plan adds ecommerce and a GA import.
The honest bit
We are not open source. If “I must run the exact code” is the requirement, Plausible wins and we say so on the method page instead of pretending a GitHub star is a substitute.
Questions
- Does Plausible have an official MCP?
- Not as of 21 August 2026. Their docs list an MCP built by the Sentry team and call it community. Cookie Free Analytics hosts POST /mcp with OAuth 2.1, or the hashed bearer for curl. Aggregates only — no visitor hashes.
- Is Cookie Free Analytics a Plausible alternative?
- Yes, if you want cookieless pageviews without a feature-tier ladder. Plausible is open source, has Business funnels plus revenue, and a larger team. Growth here is linear same-day funnels. We are cheaper, event-inclusive, and hosted in EU regions — Frankfurt functions, Ireland Postgres. Split on /europe.
- Do you count unique visitors the same way as Plausible?
- Same idea: a daily salt, then forget, so Monday cannot join Tuesday. We HMAC with a server pepper that is not stored next to the pageviews. The beacon is POST JSON with a query allowlist; theirs is also a first-party collect. They publish the AGPL code. Recipe: /methodology.
- Is the script doing anything unusual?
- POST JSON so tokens never hit access logs. utm_source / medium / campaign / content / term. Referrer without query. SPA pushState. Gzip under 1 KB. The HMAC pepper is the part Plausible does not put next to the rows.
- Do you count custom events toward the quota?
- No. Plausible adds custom events to the pageview quota. A signup on Cookie Free Analytics is a goal, not a tax.
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