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Plausible Analytics: GDPR Compliance w/o Cookie Consent Banner

by bugfactory on 7/8/24, 8:02 PM with 137 comments

  • by jwr on 7/9/24, 8:01 AM

    Serious question: what is the value of web analytics for people?

    I run a SaaS business and I dropped Google Analytics a long, long time ago. Primarily because of the tracking, but also because I really couldn't see the value of the data.

    In the old days, you could at least use the "Referer" (sic) header to know where people came from and what they searched for. But that is long gone, and the only source of that data is Google/Bing search console.

    Page visits are a vanity metric: they tell me nothing about my business. The only thing that actually matters for a SaaS are signups and MRR. Measuring your business by page views is like measuring the business performance of a Walmart by counting cars on the freeway nearby. Yes, the numbers are somewhat related, but you can't draw any conclusions.

    I made it a point not to include any third-party JavaScript on my site, but even if I were to make an exception for these analytics, I can't really see the point, unless you are running an ad-driven site where pageviews are king.

  • by Nursie on 7/9/24, 1:14 AM

    Cool. Perhaps companies and governments (gov.uk I'm looking at you) could consider using this stuff instead of forwarding all their public interactions to an unaccountable US corp.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 7/9/24, 1:40 AM

    Anything new here with this editorialized title?

    Their most recent blog post:

    Things I hate about GA4

    https://plausible.io/blog/things-i-hate-about-GA4

    (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40904139)

  • by shafyy on 7/9/24, 7:16 AM

    Let me also plug my free, open-source and self-hosted event-based analytics solution: Fugu (https://github.com/shafy/fugu). Fugu does not track unique visitors (not even daily like Plausible does) and is made for event-based tracking. Comes with included Docker config to make it easy breezy to self-host.

  • by pogue on 7/9/24, 8:35 AM

    I'm planning on running a small niche WordPress blog that I would like to monetize with adsense & possibly an affiliate program. I see there's a lot of choices for analytics available listed by users in this post. Does Adsense require Google Analytics or could I use one of these more privacy friendly ones?

  • by jsheard on 7/8/24, 10:11 PM

    Obligatory GoatCounter plug: https://www.goatcounter.com

    It's also cookieless, the hosted version is free to use within reason, and it's extremely lightweight if you choose to self-host it. It doesn't even need a separate database, it can run self-contained with SQLite (or Postgres if you prefer). A good fit for small sites where the big industrial-grade solutions are overkill.

  • by Ameo on 7/9/24, 12:14 AM

    I'm a very happy self-hosted Plausible user for years now. Solid, simple, and easy to maintain.

  • by a1o on 7/9/24, 12:16 AM

    Can I use plausible in a desktop application? I would like to have an idea of exactly which versions of an open source desktop app I maintain are being actively used so I know what to pay attention and invest efforts as I would like my users to be constantly migrating forward - we do have like 20 years of backwards compatibility so we push things forward very slowly.

  • by pdyc on 7/9/24, 5:17 AM

    Let me plugin my tool as well. Please give it a try https://easyanalytics.win/en IT does not requires cookie consent banner.

  • by kstrauser on 7/9/24, 12:07 AM

    Plausible is very nice, but it lacks much of the information from Matomo (like “after viewing /foo, visitors tend to view…”). Matomo is very nice, but it lacks the free Google Search Console integration (“people are currently finding you from these Google searches: …”) from Plausible.[0]

    I’m vain and curious enough to want to see the Google data, but not so much as to pay $160/yr for the Matomo plugin for my personal blog.

    [0] This isn’t the same as Google Analytics. You can get this information without installing a tracker on your site.

  • by rickette on 7/9/24, 7:33 AM

    When you host your static site on Cloudflare Pages you'll also get Cloudflare Analytics which is cookieless.

  • by mediumsmart on 7/11/24, 5:34 AM

    I opened the site but would it be plausible for their analytics to tell them that Orion does not load the css? Safari does it without consent.

  • by Zaheer on 7/9/24, 5:23 AM

    We use Plausible but have found it quite slow for our needs.

  • by phyzix5761 on 7/11/24, 1:16 AM

    In my opinion Cookie Consent Banners have made using the internet an overall worse experience.

  • by ayuhito on 7/9/24, 1:41 PM

    Obligatory plug for Medama, which focuses on easy self-hostability: https://github.com/medama-io/medama

    I think Plausible’s self-hosting is not simple, requiring unnecessarily heavy databases like ClickHouse, which can be overkill for the average website owner. Comparatively, this project can effectively run on a 256MB VM for most small website with no external dependencies.

  • by D13Fd on 7/8/24, 10:26 PM

    I used to like simpleanalytics.com but their site has been very slow lately.

  • by theanonymousone on 7/9/24, 6:57 AM

    I was always confused by GDPR. What are the minimum requirements to avoid the banner? Anonymising the IPs and not keeping anything else, or you can keep anything as long as you don't share them with third-parties?