Simple Analytics vs Plausible — Which Is Better for Small Sites?

You've decided to ditch Google Analytics. Good call. Now you're probably looking at Plausible and Simple Analytics — two of the most popular privacy-first alternatives. They look similar on the surface, but there are real differences that matter when you're running a small site on a budget.

Here's an honest comparison to help you pick.

The Quick Overview

Both tools are cookieless, lightweight, and designed to respect visitor privacy. Neither requires a cookie consent banner. But they take different approaches to how they handle data, what they charge, and what features they include.

Privacy: How They Differ

This is where the two tools diverge most.

Simple Analytics collects no personal data at all. No IP addresses, no hashed identifiers, no device fingerprinting. It literally cannot track individual visitors across pages or sessions. All data is aggregated from the start.

Plausible uses a daily-rotating hash of the visitor's IP address combined with the User-Agent string and a random salt. This creates a temporary identifier that lets Plausible count unique visitors and track sessions within a single day. The hash is never stored — it exists only in memory during processing — and the salt rotates every 24 hours, so the same visitor gets a different identifier the next day.

Both approaches are GDPR-compliant without requiring consent. But if your priority is absolute zero personal data processing, Simple Analytics is stricter. If you want slightly more accurate unique visitor counts and session data, Plausible's approach gives you that.

Pricing: Plausible Is Cheaper to Start

For small sites, pricing matters. Here's how they compare:

Plausible:

• Starter: $9/mo for 10K pageviews, 1 site
• Growth: $14/mo for 10K pageviews, 3 sites, team members
• Business: ~$19/mo for 10K pageviews, 10 sites, funnels, custom properties

Simple Analytics:

• Simple: $15/mo for 100K datapoints, 10 sites, 1 user
• Team: $40/mo for 100K datapoints, 20 sites, 2 users

At first glance, Plausible looks cheaper at $9/mo. But that's for a single site with only 10K pageviews. If you run multiple small sites — a portfolio, a side project, a client site — you're already at $14/mo.

Simple Analytics starts higher at $15/mo, but you get 10 sites and 100K datapoints right away. If you're a freelancer managing several small projects, Simple Analytics could actually be the better deal.

Neither tool has a permanent free tier — both offer trials only.

Features: What You Actually Get

Dashboard and reporting: Both have clean, single-page dashboards that show you what matters — visitors, pageviews, referrers, top pages, countries, devices, and browsers. If you've used Google Analytics, the simplicity of either tool will feel like a relief.

Goals and events: Both support custom event tracking and goals. Plausible's funnel feature (on the Business plan) lets you see where visitors drop off in a multi-step process. Simple Analytics has automated event collection that can track outbound link clicks and downloads without extra code.

Google Search Console integration: Plausible integrates with Google Search Console to show you which search queries bring visitors to your site — directly in your analytics dashboard. Simple Analytics doesn't have this.

API access: Both offer APIs, though Simple Analytics gates it behind the Team plan ($40/mo). Plausible includes API access on all plans.

Data export: Both let you export your data. Simple Analytics makes this a prominent feature, emphasizing that your data belongs to you.

Email reports: Both can send you weekly or monthly traffic reports by email.

Self-Hosting

Plausible is open source (AGPL license) and can be self-hosted for free. If you have a VPS and are comfortable with Docker, you can run Plausible with no pageview limits and no monthly fees. The community edition gets regular updates.

Simple Analytics cannot be self-hosted. It's cloud-only.

If self-hosting matters to you — for cost savings, data sovereignty, or principle — Plausible wins this category outright.

Script Size and Performance

Both scripts are dramatically smaller than Google Analytics (~22 KB), but there's a difference:

• Plausible: ~1 KB
• Simple Analytics: ~3 KB

For most sites, both are fast enough that you'll never notice the difference. But if you're obsessively optimizing every byte — and if you're reading a comparison like this, you might be — Plausible is lighter.

For context, there are even smaller options. Fairlytics, for example, ships a 510-byte script, making it the lightest privacy-first analytics tool available. It also has a free tier for sites under 10K pageviews/month.

Who Should Pick Which?

Choose Plausible if:

• You want the cheapest entry point ($9/mo for one site)
• Google Search Console integration matters to you
• You want the option to self-host later
• You're comfortable with IP-hash-based unique visitor counting
• You want funnels (on the Business plan)

Choose Simple Analytics if:

• You want absolute zero personal data processing
• You run multiple sites and want them all on one plan
• You need automated event collection out of the box
• You prefer a company that doesn't process IP addresses at all
• You don't need self-hosting

Consider a third option if:

• You need a free tier (neither Plausible nor Simple Analytics offers one)
• You want the smallest possible script
• You're on a tight budget and $9-15/mo is too much for a side project

The Bottom Line

Both Plausible and Simple Analytics are solid, privacy-respecting tools. You won't go wrong with either one. The real question is what you prioritize: Plausible gives you more features per dollar and the flexibility of self-hosting. Simple Analytics gives you stricter privacy guarantees and multi-site simplicity.

For a solo developer running one small site, Plausible at $9/mo is hard to beat. For a freelancer managing multiple client sites who wants the strictest possible privacy stance, Simple Analytics at $15/mo makes sense.

And if you're looking for something with a free tier, a sub-1KB script, and no IP processing at all, Fairlytics might be worth a look.

Full disclosure: this blog is published by Fairlytics, so we have a horse in this race. We've tried to be fair to both tools — they're both doing good work for web privacy.