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 Growth Analyst
Product and growth analyst at a B2B SaaS in Munich with a marketing site, a web app and a mobile app. Needs signups traced from the first campaign click to the first paid invoice, funnels and cohorts on custom events, and the raw events in the company's warehouse every night. Has moved tracking twice and knows that a tool without a raw export means starting the history again from zero.
Plausible Analytics
This judge's pick
Simple Analytics
Criterion by criterion
Traffic, sources & campaign reports
Plausible Analytics
The documented dashboard covers pages, entry and exit pages, sources and referrers, UTM campaigns with automatic channel grouping, countries, regions, cities, devices and browsers, a real-time view refreshing every 30 seconds, saved personal and site segments, annotations, weekly or monthly embedded email reports, Search Console queries shown beside the traffic, and a consolidated view across sites — for a marketing site plus app plus docs subdomains that is most of what a growth team runs on. Custom dashboards are documented only through the Data Studio connector on the Business plan, and we found no public information on configurable channel grouping or a statement that reports are unsampled.
Simple Analytics
The dashboard covers pageviews, referrers, full UTM support for source, medium, campaign and content, with drilldown from a UTM source into devices, browsers and countries, filters across reports, saved filtered views with shared access, email reports and annotations. I found no public information on date comparison, roll-up reporting across several sites, or a real-time view beyond embeddable live visitor stats, which keeps it short of organisation-grade reporting.
Goals, events, funnels & e-commerce
Plausible Analytics
Custom events with properties, pageview goals without code changes, automatic tracking of outbound links, file downloads, form submissions, 404s and scroll depth, three funnel types with per-step drop-off, revenue per step and date comparison, user journeys, and revenue attribution fully filterable by campaign and source — that covers most of the click-to-first-invoice chain I need, and funnels even keep the session across subdomains and a Stripe checkout. We found no public information on cohort or retention reports, on compared attribution models, on product-level cart and checkout tracking, or on sending conversions back to Google Ads or Meta server to server.
Simple Analytics
Goals built on custom events, the sa event function with metadata, automated outbound clicks and downloads, multi-step funnels with drop-off, and conversion-rate tracking for signup clicks and completed signups are all documented. For my campaign-click-to-invoice trace, I found no public information on e-commerce orders and revenue, cohort retention, attribution models, or conversions sent back to ad platforms.
Consent-free operation & data minimisation
Plausible Analytics
Cookieless counting with the method published — a daily salt hashed with domain, IP address and user agent, salt deleted every 24 hours, raw IP and user agent never stored — plus a data policy listing exactly which fields are kept, open-source code anyone can audit, and an independent legal assessment confirming consent-free analytics under GDPR and PECR. We found no public information citing the German TDDDG paragraph or a CNIL ruling, and retention is described as the lifetime of the account rather than configurable per data type.
Simple Analytics
No cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting, IP addresses dropped rather than hashed, and the visitor-counting method published — a new visit comes from an external referrer, no session timeout, no persistent identity. The consent-free position is argued against named law including the ePrivacy Directive, Germany's TTDSG, UK PECR and CCPA, with open-source collection scripts and the stored fields listed, though they state plainly that not every visit is guaranteed to be recorded. No named authority recognition, cited legal opinion or stated accuracy figures keep it off the top level.
Data access, export & self-hosting
Plausible Analytics
For a nightly warehouse sync there is a scheduled raw event export delivered daily to S3-compatible object storage, plus a Stats API with filters, segments and revenue metrics and a separate Events API for collection — but the raw export is documented only on Enterprise plans with custom pricing, and the generally available exports are aggregated (one row per day per report, top 300 entries) or re-importable only into another Plausible site. The GA4 import is aggregate at day level, the self-hosted Community Edition is free under AGPLv3 with the vendor listing marketing funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals and SSO as excluded from that edition, and deletion on termination is documented with a settings export still possible after a subscription lapses.
Simple Analytics
Raw pageviews and events export through a documented Export API and the dashboard in CSV, Excel CSV, TSV, JSON, NDJSON, Avro and Parquet with field selection, next to a Stats API, an Admin API, warehouse export via CloudQuery, Looker Studio and Power BI connectors, and a Google Analytics historical import — so a migration does not restart history from zero. The terms state the customer owns the analytics data, and deletion on termination with a 90-day backup horizon is documented. I found no public information on a self-hosted edition, and unsampled reporting is not explicitly stated.
Installation, integrations & performance
Plausible Analytics
A header snippet documented with its size (135KB less JavaScript per visitor than Google Analytics, 54 times smaller), an official WordPress plugin with WooCommerce revenue tracking, an official GTM template, guides for Shopify, Webflow, Ghost, Docusaurus and more, automatic React/Vue/Angular routing, Swift and Android SDKs, a first-party proxy to bypass ad blockers, team roles with guest access at site level, SSO on Enterprise, and a public status page with historical uptime. We found no public information on white-labeling for agencies or a published SLA.
Simple Analytics
A script under 5 KB with the size claimed publicly, automatic pageviews in React, Vue and Angular, an official WordPress plugin, guides for Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Ghost, Netlify and Google Tag Manager, first-party proxying on your own subdomain, server-side ingestion from a backend, and a setup wizard make web installation easy. I found no public information on iOS or Android SDKs — the mobile app is a viewing app with widgets — nor on single sign-on, granular per-site roles, or a public status page with uptime history.
European sovereignty
Plausible Analytics
An Estonian entity, Plausible Insights OÜ, with a full imprint (registration number, VAT number, Tartu address), self-funded with no outside investors since 2018, hosting on named German infrastructure in Falkenstein on Hetzner, visitor data stated never to leave the EU, a subprocessor list naming Bunny (Slovenia), UpCloud (Finland) and Friendly Captcha (Germany), a DPA that applies automatically to all customers, and a documented self-hosted Community Edition that keeps the records on your own servers. We found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification, and the captured pages list some support and payment subprocessors without their locations.
Simple Analytics
Analytics data stays in the EU by design: primary infrastructure in the Netherlands on named hosts (Hetzner, Leaseweb, Worldstream, Bunny), European providers only since 2018, a Dutch contracting entity with KvK number and VAT ID, a published subprocessor list with locations, and a data processing agreement page that will also sign customer agreements. The captured pages give different figures for the contracting entity — Simple Analytics B.V. with KvK 88269922 versus a sole proprietorship with KvK 60978856 — though both are Dutch. Non-EU subprocessors sit in the billing and support chain (Stripe, Cal.com, Zoom, GitHub, opt-in OpenAI) rather than the visitor-data path, and SOC 2 is only stated as in progress.
Pricing transparency
Plausible Analytics
Starter at €9 /month with up to 10k monthly pageviews, Growth at €14 /month with 3 sites and 3 team members, Business at €19 /month with 10 sites, 10 team members, funnels, ecommerce revenue attribution and the Stats API, two months free on yearly billing, a 30-day trial without a credit card, and a free self-hosted Community Edition — the core tiers are computable for an annual budget. SSO and the scheduled raw event exports sit in an Enterprise tier quoted as "Contact us", and we found no public information on what happens when page views exceed a tier, on VAT treatment or on a minimum term.
Simple Analytics
The starting point is public: €20 /month, a free plan with 1 user, 5 websites, 1 month of history and unlimited pageviews under fair use, extra users at +€20/mo, annual billing with 2 months free, cancellation at any moment, and stated overage handling with an email notice, one week to adjust, then an automatic upgrade. The scaling rule is only described as usage-based on data points with a three-month average without published price bands per volume, the enterprise tier is custom quoted on a call, and the export API requires a plan that includes it without that plan's price shown. A buyer can price a hobby site exactly but not a scaling B2B funnel.
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.