# Plausible review: analytics that answer the four questions I actually have > A fast, honest traffic dashboard that tells you where visitors came from and what they did — and firmly refuses to tell you anything more. - Tool: Plausible Analytics (https://plausible.io) - Category: Analytics - Rating: 4/5 - Pricing: $9/month, Usage-based, priced on monthly pageviews - Best for: Content sites and small SaaS marketing sites where the questions are "what is working" and "should I write more of it". - Not for: Anyone who needs funnels across sessions, cohort retention, or per-user behaviour to make decisions. - Last tested: 2026-07-09 - Published: 2026-07-14 - Author: Harshal Katre, Solo founder — https://saasytake.com/about - Source: https://saasytake.com/reviews/plausible-analytics ## Key points - Plausible replaced Google Analytics 4 on both my sites in about ten minutes, using a single script tag. - The script is under 1 KB gzipped against roughly 45 KB for the GA4 tag it replaced. - It sets no cookies, so I removed the cookie banner from both sites and signup-page conversion rose measurably. - It has no cross-session funnels, no retention curves and no per-user history, so it cannot answer product questions. - Pricing is metered on monthly pageviews, so one post going wide pushes you into a higher tier for that month. ## Reviewer experience I have run Plausible on two production sites since July 2025, alongside the GA4 property it replaced, on the 100k-pageview plan. ## Review I ran Google Analytics for six years mostly because it was free and I had never questioned it. The thing that finally moved me was not privacy — it was that I could not answer "did last month's post do anything" in under five minutes without a saved report I had built and forgotten. Plausible answers that in one screen. That is the entire pitch, and for a marketing site it is close to correct. ## Setup One script tag. Ten minutes including deploying the change. The dashboard was live before I finished the migration checklist I had written for myself. The GA4 import ran overnight and brought over pageviews and top referrers cleanly. Everything that depended on GA's event schema arrived as noise. I would not plan around the import; treat it as a rough historical backdrop and start clean. ## What it does well **It loads instantly and it is legible.** One page, one time range, everything on it. Sources, pages, countries, devices, and a goal list. My weekly review of "what did people read and where did they come from" now takes about ninety seconds. **Goals and custom events are simple enough that I actually configured them.** I have four: signup started, signup completed, pricing viewed, docs viewed. In GA4 I had meant to set these up for three years. **The public dashboard is a real feature.** I share the marketing site's stats link openly, and it has been quietly useful — people trust numbers you are willing to show. ## Where it stops This is a **traffic** tool, not a product analytics tool. There is no cross-session funnel, no retention curve, no way to ask what a specific cohort of users did in week three. When I wanted to know why trial conversion dropped in May, Plausible could tell me that traffic and source mix were unchanged — genuinely useful — and then it was out of answers, and I was in the database writing SQL. That is a deliberate design decision, not a bug, and the docs say so. But it means the honest recommendation for most SaaS businesses is: Plausible for the marketing site, something else for the product. I run exactly that split, and paying for two tools is a real cost that the rating has to account for. The other friction is **pricing on pageviews**. A single post going wide pushes you into the next tier for the month, which is the moment you least want a bill. It is not expensive; it is just the wrong shape for spiky content sites, and I have been bumped twice. ## Support Two emails, both answered inside a day by someone who plainly worked on the product. The second answer told me the thing I wanted did not exist and was not planned, which is more useful than a roadmap link. ## The verdict Four out of five, and the missing point is not a complaint about quality — it is scope. Plausible does one job about as well as it can be done, and the moment your question gets more specific than "where did they come from and what did they read", you are opening a second tab. For a content or marketing site, I would install it again this afternoon. For understanding a product, it was never the tool. ## FAQ ### Do I still need a cookie banner with Plausible? In my reading, and my lawyer's, no — it sets no cookies and stores no personal data. I removed the banner from both sites and conversion on the signup page went up measurably. Confirm this for your own jurisdiction before you copy me. ### How much does the script slow a page down? Under 1 KB gzipped in my build, against roughly 45 KB for the GA4 tag it replaced. On a content page that was the single largest performance win available to me. ### Can I keep my historical Google Analytics data? Yes, there is a GA import, and it worked for pageviews and top sources. Anything that relied on GA's event model came across as a mess. I imported it, looked at it twice, and have not opened it since. --- Cite as: Harshal Katre, "Plausible review: analytics that answer the four questions I actually have", SaasyTake, 2026-07-14. https://saasytake.com/reviews/plausible-analytics