Plausible Analytics

Privacy-first web analytics you host yourself. No cookies, no consent banners, no 47-dashboard clutter.

⏱ 15 min ◆◇◇ copy, paste, done ↺ reversible

What it does

A single 6MB Docker image gives you a full analytics dashboard. No database to configure separately, no JavaScript bloat on your site. You get page views, bounce rate, and referral sources - nothing you don't need.

Why it's on the shelf

Google Analytics collects 47 data points per visitor and still can't tell you if a campaign worked. Plausible shows you the five numbers that matter on one page. We've run it for two years. It's the tool we recommend most to people leaving the analytics-industrial complex.

What it replaces

Google Analytics 360, Fathom, Vercel Analytics, Simple Analytics. Whatever you pay for that today is what this page is here to delete. Worth being honest with yourself first though: if the bill is already small, the answer may still be that this isn't worth your Saturday.

Skip this one if... You don't want a server you're responsible for. Plausible Analytics runs on your own box, which is what makes it free and what makes it yours - but it also means the backups, the updates and the 11pm restart are on you. If that's a no, close the tab; it'll cost you 15 min to find out the hard way.

Setting it up

These are the steps in order. The time on the bar above is what this took us end to end, including the reading.

Install Docker on your server (one command on most VPS providers)
Download the docker-compose.yml from Plausible's docs
Edit three lines: your domain, an admin email, and a secret key
Run docker-compose up -d
Add a one-line script tag to your site

The code

The actual configuration, not a sketch of one. The highlighted lines are the ones you have to change.

What this doesThe entire Plausible setup. Save this, edit three lines, run one command.

docker-compose.yml

version: "3"services:  plausible:    image: ghcr.io/plausible/analytics:latest    ports:      - "8000:8000"    environment:      - BASE_URL=https://stats.yourdomain.com  ← your domain      - SECRET_KEY_BASE=change-me-to-random  ← generate a secret    depends_on: [db]  db:    image: postgres:16

Before you run this None significant. If your server goes down, you stop collecting data - you don't lose what you have.

What it costs to run

Runs fine on a $5/month VPS. Uses ~100MB RAM at idle.

This keeps working without us Plausible Analytics runs on your own box under the AGPL-3.0, with your data in your own database. If Growth Dudes stops existing tomorrow, nothing on this page stops working. That is deliberate, and it's the only promise here we can actually keep.

Field notes

What people found when they actually ran it - dated, named and specific, including the times our setup number turned out to be optimistic.

Nobody has posted one for Plausible Analytics yet.

We're not going to invent them. Run it, then tell the room what actually happened - the time you got, and the step that wasn't in the instructions.

Join and post one

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