As of 30 Oct 2026, the panel rates Plausible Analytics 2.5/5 and Simple Analytics 3/5 in Web Analytics. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Plausible Analytics and 1 picks Simple Analytics, 1 calls it a tie. Plausible Analytics scores higher on 1 of 7 criteria (Goals, events, funnels & e-commerce). Simple Analytics scores higher on 6 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency, Consent-free operation & data minimisation, Data access, export & self-hosting, plus 3 more). Provenance — Plausible Analytics: EU-Made; Simple Analytics: EU-Made. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Simple Analytics holds the higher mean on six of seven criteria — consent and privacy 6.7 to 5.7, data ownership 6.3 to 5.5, sovereignty 6.2 to 5.5, pricing transparency 5.0 to 3.8, implementation 5.7 to 5.3, traffic reporting 5.0 to 4.8 — while Plausible Analytics carries the judge leans on six: 4–1 on traffic reporting, conversions and events, and implementation; 3–1 on data ownership and sovereignty; 2–1 with three ties on consent and privacy. Pricing transparency is the one criterion where no judge leans Plausible Analytics (0–2, four ties); its pages price only the 10k monthly pageview band, with Enterprise at 'Contact us'. The weighted totals divide the bench: four favor Plausible Analytics 7.4–8.0 against 6.3–7.0, the skeptic reads it 0 to Simple Analytics' 7.2, and the public-sector bench reads both 0. Both list EU-only data residency and founder-held ownership, with entities in Estonia and the Netherlands.
Choose Plausible Analytics if
You need conversions and events coverage — four judges lean Plausible Analytics there, mean 4.5 to 4.2.
Your team builds on documented APIs and exports and wants a 30-day trial with no credit card — the implementation lean is Plausible Analytics 4 to 1.
Your data protection officer leads procurement — that weighted total reads Plausible Analytics 7.6 to 7, with an automatically applicable data processing agreement and visitor data stated to be processed on servers owned by European companies and never to leave the EU.
Your buying committee resembles the e-commerce lead, agency developer and growth analyst — their totals read 7.5, 8 and 7.4 against 6.3, 6.8 and 6.7.
Choose Simple Analytics if
You need published prices beyond an entry band before signing — pricing transparency means 5.0 to 3.8, no judge leans Plausible Analytics (0–2 with four ties), and its pages price only the 10k monthly pageview band with Enterprise at 'Contact us'.
Your reviewer scores like the skeptic bench — its weighted total reads Simple Analytics 7.2 to Plausible Analytics 0.
You need a consent-free position argued against named law — Simple Analytics cites ePrivacy Article 5(3), Germany's TTDSG and the UK PECR, drops IP addresses rather than storing or hashing them, and its consent and privacy mean reads 6.7 to 5.7 (leans split 2–1 with three ties).
Your contracting requires a Dutch entity — jurisdiction is listed as the Netherlands — noting that the captured pages give different figures for the contracting entity.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The Data Protection Officer
External data protection officer for eleven mid-sized companies, three of which still ran Universal Analytics when the Austrian authority ruled on it. Reads the data policy before the feature page: which fields are stored, how a visitor is counted without a cookie, whether the IP address is cut before it is written, who the subprocessors are and where. Signs off a site without a banner only when the vendor states its reading of §25 TDDDG in writing.
Plausible Analytics
This judge's pick
Simple Analytics
Criterion by criterion
Traffic, sources & campaign reports
Plausible Analytics
The dashboard documentation covers pages, entry and exit pages, sources, channels and UTM tags, countries, regions and cities, devices, browsers and operating systems, a real-time view refreshing every 30 seconds, saved personal and site segments, combined filters, Search Console data beside the traffic, a consolidated view across sites, annotations, and weekly or monthly email reports. Custom dashboards appear to be reached only through the Data Studio connector, channel grouping is described as automatic rather than configurable, and we found no public information stating that reports are unsampled.
Simple Analytics
Pages, referrers, UTM sources, mediums, campaigns and content, countries and devices are reported with filters across all of them, weekly or monthly email reports, shared and public dashboards, chart annotations, bot and referral-spam filtering, and a published account of how a visit is counted — a unique pageview starts a session, an external referrer starts a new one. We found no public information on date comparison, configurable channel grouping or roll-up reporting across several sites, so the evidence sits above a basic dashboard but short of an organisation-wide reporting suite.
Goals, events, funnels & e-commerce
Plausible Analytics
Pageview and custom-event goals with custom properties, automatic tracking of outbound links, file downloads, form submissions, 404s and scroll depth without code changes, funnels of two to eight steps with per-step drop-off and three funnel types, revenue goals in multiple currencies filterable by source and campaign, user journeys, and setups for WordPress, WooCommerce and Shopify are all documented. We found no public information on product-level commerce tracking such as carts, checkout and orders, on cohorts and retention, on compared attribution models, or on conversions sent back to ad platforms.
Simple Analytics
Goals built on defined events, custom events through the sa event function with metadata, outbound clicks and downloads tracked automatically, and multi-step funnels showing where visitors drop off are all documented in the guides. We found no public information on e-commerce and revenue tracking, attribution models, or cohorts and retention, which is where the evidence stops.
Consent-free operation & data minimisation
Plausible Analytics
The data policy lists exactly what is collected and how a visitor is counted — a daily salted hash of IP address, domain and user agent, with the salt deleted every 24 hours and the raw IP address and user agent never stored — alongside no cookies, no persistent identifiers and no cross-site or cross-device tracking, with an independent legal assessment titled "GDPR-compliant web analytics without consent" and PECR compliance cited. For my own sign-off standard I note the reading is stated against GDPR on a legitimate-interest basis, with pseudonymisation on arrival and full anonymisation within 24 hours; we found no public information on a position specific to §25 TDDDG, on retention settings per data type, or on supplied wording for the site's privacy policy.
Simple Analytics
No cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting, IP addresses dropped rather than truncated or hashed, no visitor identifiers at all, and exactly which fields are stored (page URL, referrer, UTM parameters, time zone as a country proxy, anonymised user agent values) documented — with the collection script open source on GitHub. The consent position is argued against named law — ePrivacy Article 5(3), the German TTDSG, the UK PECR — including the frank statement that cookieless is a technical choice, not a legal exemption. What holds it below the highest level: no named authority or completed certification recognises the consent-free mode (SOC 2 is listed as in progress), and we found no public information on retention settings per data type or on supplied wording for the customer's own privacy policy.
Data access, export & self-hosting
Plausible Analytics
Exports are unusually well documented: a read-only stats API with full filter, operator and segment support alongside collection and site-management APIs, CSV files for every dashboard report, a site-settings export in a format that reimports into another Plausible site, daily raw event exports to the customer's own S3-compatible storage on Enterprise plans, a Google Analytics 4 import, no retention limit on the entry plan, and deletion on termination with a documented export window before the data is removed. The self-hosted Community Edition is AGPL-licensed with its own installation guide, though the vendor itself lists funnels, user journeys, revenue goals, SSO and the sites API as not part of it, so the hosted and self-hosted feature sets are not equal.
Simple Analytics
The terms state the customer owns the analytics data; raw page views and events export through a dedicated API in open formats including CSV, JSON, NDJSON, Avro and Parquet with field selection; connectors are named for CloudQuery, Looker Studio, Power BI and Chartbrew; historical Google Analytics import exists; and deletion on account closure is documented with a 90-day backup window. We found no public information on a self-hosted or on-premise edition, so every visitor record remains on the vendor's servers.
Installation, integrations & performance
Plausible Analytics
The script's weight is stated at 135KB less than Google Analytics, with an official WordPress plugin, guides for thirteen named website builders and CMSs, automatic single-page-app routing support, Android, iOS, Flutter and Qt SDKs, a Google Tag Manager template, a first-party script proxy against ad blockers, a server-side events API, view-only and guest roles, single sign-on on Enterprise, and a public status page showing 99.99% uptime over the last 90 days. We found no public information on white-label options for agencies or on published SLA and support terms.
Simple Analytics
A single script under 5 KB with the size and page-speed claim published, automatic pageviews in single-page apps, an official WordPress plugin, guides for Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Ghost, Cloudflare, Netlify and Google Tag Manager as well as frameworks like Next.js and Django, a first-party proxy or custom subdomain against ad blockers, server-side events from the backend, and a setup wizard to verify installation. We found no public information on iOS or Android SDKs, per-site roles, single sign-on, or a public status page with uptime history, which is what separates an agency install from an organisational one.
European sovereignty
Plausible Analytics
The contracting entity is Plausible Insights OÜ of Tartu, Estonia, registry code 14709274, independent and bootstrapped with no outside investors; hosting is named and European — Hetzner in Germany for infrastructure, UpCloud in Finland for databases and exports — under the stated position that all visitor data is processed on EU-owned infrastructure and never leaves the EU, with a published DPA applying automatically, audit rights, a right to object to subprocessor changes, and a self-hosted edition the customer can run on its own servers. The subprocessor list is public, but locations are given only for the European infrastructure providers, leaving the email, support and payment links — Postmark, Paddle, Help Scout, Anthropic — unlocated, and we found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications.
Simple Analytics
The visitor-data chain is documented end to end: primary infrastructure in the Netherlands on named providers (Hetzner, Leaseweb, Worldstream, Bunny CDN), a subprocessor list giving each provider's location and the data it sees, the statement that visitor data is never transferred outside the EU, and non-EU processing (OpenAI, Google) only after opt-in. Two things hold it back: the captured pages give different figures for the contracting entity — a Dutch private company under KvK 88269922 on the company page versus a sole proprietorship under number 60978856 in the privacy policy — and the only certification named is SOC 2 in progress, while billing runs through Stripe in the US and email reports through Mailgun, a US company on EU servers.
Pricing transparency
Plausible Analytics
The tiers are public with their inclusions — Starter at €9 /month for up to 10k monthly pageviews, Growth at €14 /month, Business at €19 /month, with sites and team members per plan and features such as the stats API and funnels mapped to tiers — plus a self-hosted Community Edition free of licence fees with community support only and a 30-day trial without credit card. The pricing page indicates traffic bands up to 10M+ monthly pageviews but the captured pages price only the 10k band, Enterprise is "Contact us", and we found no public information on overage handling, minimum term or VAT treatment.
Simple Analytics
The free tier is published exactly — one user, five websites, one month of history, unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy — the paid price is €20 /month with extra users at +€20/mo per extra user, billing is usage-based on data points averaged over the previous three months, overage handling is stated (email notice, one week to adjust, then automatic upgrade), annual payment gives two months free, and cancellation is possible at any moment. We found no public information on what the €20 /month plan includes in data points or websites, on further tiers beyond it, or on which plans include the export API, so a buyer cannot compute a full year's cost for a known traffic volume; enterprise pricing is on request.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Plausible Analytics
Simple Analytics
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
Questions about Plausible Analytics and Simple Analytics
Which is better, Plausible Analytics or Simple Analytics?
As of 30 Oct 2026, the panel rates Simple Analytics higher: 3/5 against 2.5/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 4 of the 6 judges pick Plausible Analytics and 1 picks Simple Analytics, 1 calls it a tie. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Plausible Analytics or Simple Analytics European?
Plausible Analytics is European (EU-Made). Simple Analytics is European (EU-Made). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Where do Plausible Analytics and Simple Analytics store customer data?
Per the vendors’ own pages as captured — Plausible Analytics: Default not stated; pages mention the EU and Germany. Simple Analytics: Default not stated; pages mention the EU.
Do Plausible Analytics and Simple Analytics have a free plan?
As of 30 Oct 2026, Simple Analytics’s own pages state a free plan; Plausible Analytics’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.