Why We Use Plausible (Google Analytics Alternative)

We've all been there. Google Analytics is the go-to analytics, monitoring, and reporting platform for many, including SaaS builders like us.

But recently, we've decided to break the norms. We collectively decided to choose Plausible as our Google Analytics alternative.

If you are new to Plausible, it is a simple, lightweight, ethical, open-source, and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.

Below are a few reasons why we use Plausible instead of Google Analytics.

The ethical dilemma and privacy reasons

According to Google, 85% of all websites use Google Analytics. The company tracks most of the world's web traffic and is also one of the world's largest advertising companies. What could go wrong?

Google Analytics collects personal data at its deepest level. You must disclose this information to your site visitors as a site owner. If you prefer not to put out a banner or Analytics privacy policy, you should use an alternative that gives you privacy-friendly analytics.

In short, privacy is under threat on the Internet. But there's a growing shift toward protecting people's personal information. We are happy to learn that Plausible is part of that shift.

Google Analytics script is bloated.

Makers who only care about the most helpful website statistics and want to make their sites as lean and fast as possible may find that Google's Global Site Tag and Universal Analytics scripts are, in fact, bloated as f**k.

https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js weighs around 28 KB.

The first Gtag downloads another JavaScript file called Google Analytics tag (https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js), which adds 17.7 KB to your page size.

Plausible Analytics script weighs less than 1 KB. Sweet, isn't it?

Google Analytics is overkill.

I've always felt Google Analytics is overkill for niche SaaS apps and product websites.

YES, We need to know DAUs, conversion rate, traffic origin, etc.

But a complex tool like Google Analytics isn't required to track those data.

Google Analytics has more than 125 menu items on its left-hand side navigation menu. Each menu item has a report you can use to gather insights from your website. All these different Analytics reports track more than 290 other metrics combined.

And for new folks, Google Analytics isn't an intuitive option. You need some training or prior knowledge to use the platform.

Google Analytics is abused by referral spam.

Have you noticed a lot of referral URLs in your Google Analytics dashboard? A bad actor is trying to "advertise" their product or service by spamming Google Analytics. They send fake visitors to your site. They intend to get you curious and visit their site.

Google Analytics has been plagued with referral spam for years: it can skew the stats you see. To stop referral spam, many site owners put a lot of effort into manually blocking each spam domain and IP address range. This is time-consuming and frustrating, especially if the spammer already knows your website's IP address.

I could go on, but you get the gist, right?

We believe Plausible has created an excellent analytics tool that is both developer and user-friendly. We've also learned that we could use Plausible to track the analytics metrics of our Google Chrome Extension.

Here are some of the features that attracted us to consider Plausible

1. Fully open source.
2. Simple to understand and use.
3. A lightweight script that weighs less than 1 KB. And it won't affect our web performance at all.
4. It doesn't use cookies, so we can avoid the cookie banner.
5. It doesn't collect personal data so that we can omit GDPR, and CCPA consent prompts
6. All the data is hosted in Germany EU.

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