Plausible Community Edition
The self hosted edition of Plausible's lightweight, cookie free analytics
Plausible Community Edition is the AGPL-3.0 self hosted version of the Plausible analytics service. It gives you a clear one page dashboard, goals and referrer tracking, built on ClickHouse so it stays fast with a lot of traffic.
Best for when
- you want cookie free analytics that stay fast at higher traffic
- you like a dashboard you can read in a few seconds
- you might move to the hosted version later and want the same tool
Watch out for
- ClickHouse needs more RAM than lighter alternatives
- the community edition lags the hosted service and lacks some of its features
- the tracker is public and ad blockers cause undercounting
Where it differs from Umami
Both are privacy friendly and cookie free. Plausible stores events in ClickHouse, a database built for analytics, which keeps queries quick on busy sites, and its dashboard is a single page designed to be read in seconds.
The company behind it sells a hosted version, and the community edition is released separately, a little behind it and without some features. That is the honest model: you get the core for free and pay if you want them to run it.
Heavier than it looks
ClickHouse wants memory, so this stack needs noticeably more RAM than a single app with PostgreSQL. It runs the app, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse together, and the project provides a Compose setup for it.
Like any tracker it must be public, and ad blockers will hide some visits. Back up both databases, and follow the project's upgrade notes, because ClickHouse upgrades can need manual steps.
