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 Public-Sector Site Owner
Web editor for a district administration whose site serves 400,000 residents, from vehicle registration to daycare places. The state data protection authority publishes guidance on analytics, and the council will not show a cookie banner on a public service. Needs to know which pages people search for and where forms are abandoned, with data that stays in Germany or on the municipal data centre's own servers, and a contract the procurement office can sign.
Plausible Analytics
Simple Analytics
This judge calls it a tie.
Criterion by criterion
Traffic, sources & campaign reports
Plausible Analytics
The dashboard covers visitors, pageviews, entry and exit pages, referrers and channels, UTM campaigns with automatic channel grouping, countries, devices and browsers, plus a real-time view refreshing every 30 seconds; saved personal and site segments, annotations, a consolidated multi-site dashboard, weekly and monthly email reports and password-protectable shared links are documented. Google Search Console data appears beside the traffic, and traffic spike and drop notifications work against a user-set limit. We found no public information stating reports are unsampled, or on custom dashboards and report builders inside the product itself.
Simple Analytics
The dashboard covers pages, referrers and UTM campaigns with drill-down into devices, browsers and countries, filters across reports, annotations, weekly or monthly email reports, embedded and public dashboards, and a published method for how visits and sessions are counted from recorded events, with bot and referral-spam filtering. For a district site serving 400,000 residents I would also want date comparisons and roll-up reporting across department subdomains, and we found no public information on either, nor on which internal search terms visitors use. The honest statement that not every visit can be recorded builds trust, but the package sits below a full custom-report-builder level.
Goals, events, funnels & e-commerce
Plausible Analytics
Goals can be pageviews or custom events with properties, and outbound links, file downloads, form submissions, 404 pages and scroll depth are measured without code — the form and funnel reporting is exactly what we need for finding where residents abandon applications. Funnels run two to eight steps in three modes with per-step drop-off, date comparison and revenue at the steps, and revenue goals work with named shop systems such as WooCommerce and Shopify, with user journeys for exploring paths. We found no public information on cohort and retention analysis, comparison of attribution models, or conversions passed back to ad platforms.
Simple Analytics
Goals defined on events, custom events via a JavaScript function with metadata, automatic tracking of outbound clicks, emails and downloads, and multi-step funnels with drop-off per step give us exactly the form-abandonment picture we need for vehicle registration and daycare applications. We found no public information on revenue or e-commerce tracking, cohort and retention analysis, or attribution models.
Consent-free operation & data minimisation
Plausible Analytics
No cookies, no persistent identifiers and no cross-site or cross-device tracking; visitors are counted with a daily hash of salt, website domain, IP address and user agent, the salt is deleted every 24 hours, and raw IP addresses and user agents are never stored — so the council would show no cookie banner. The consent-free position is stated against named law (GDPR, PECR, CCPA) and backed by an independent legal assessment by a data protection lawyer on a legitimate-interest basis, with the open-source code auditable. We found no public information naming the German provision on device access or a data protection authority's recognition of the consent-free mode, nor supplied wording for our privacy policy.
Simple Analytics
This is the strongest area for a council that will not show a cookie banner: no cookies, IP addresses neither stored nor hashed, no fingerprinting, no visitor identifiers of any kind, with the counting method published and the consent-free position stated against Germany's TTDSG, the ePrivacy Directive's Article 5(3) and the CNIL line — plus a Do Not Track setting and an open-source collection script whose stored fields are listed one by one. The vendor's reading is that no personal data is collected at all, so no consent and, in most cases, no data processing agreement is required, though they will review and sign customer-provided agreements. We found no public information on configurable retention per data type for paid plans, supplied wording for our privacy notice, or an external audit of the consent-free mode.
Data access, export & self-hosting
Plausible Analytics
The customer retains full ownership of the website data, with a documented read-only stats API, CSV exports of every dashboard report, a site-level export that can be re-imported into another Plausible instance, historical import from Google Analytics 4, and scheduled daily raw event exports to S3-compatible storage on the Enterprise plan. The Community Edition is AGPL-licensed with an installation guide and can run on our own municipal servers in any country, though it omits funnels, user journeys, revenue goals and single sign-on, and dashboard exports and the stats API require an active subscription. Data is deleted with an export window after a subscription lapses.
Simple Analytics
Ownership is explicit — the vendor's terms state the customer owns the analytics data — and raw page views and events can be exported from the dashboard or via an export API in open formats including CSV, JSON, NDJSON and Parquet, with connectors to Looker Studio, Power BI, Chartbrew and warehouse loading via CloudQuery, plus a historical Google Analytics import. Everything including backups is permanently deleted within 90 days of account deletion. We found no public information on a self-hosted or on-premise edition for our municipal data centre; only the user-facing scripts are open source.
Installation, integrations & performance
Plausible Analytics
A snippet goes into the page head, stated at 135KB less JavaScript per visitor than Google Analytics, with an official WordPress plugin handling installation, WooCommerce revenue and automatic form tracking, guides for many named platforms, automatic single-page-app support, Android, Flutter and Swift SDKs, a Google Tag Manager template, a first-party script proxy and a server-side events API. Team roles, single sign-on on Enterprise, an installation testing tool and a status page with 99.99% uptime over 90 days are documented. We found no public information on published SLA terms or white-labelling for agencies.
Simple Analytics
Installation is a single asynchronous script under 5 KB with a stated no-impact performance claim, an official WordPress plugin, guides for Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, Ghost, Netlify and Google Tag Manager plus frameworks like React, Vue and Next.js, automatic page views in single-page apps, a first-party proxy or own subdomain against ad blockers, server-side event sending, and a setup wizard with browser testing on real devices. We found no public information on team roles per site, single sign-on, or a public status page with uptime history — a gap for our IT department.
European sovereignty
Plausible Analytics
The contracting entity is Plausible Insights OÜ in Tartu, Estonia with registry and VAT numbers; visitor data sits on Hetzner servers in Falkenstein, Germany with UpCloud in Finland for databases, all stated to stay in the EU on EU-owned infrastructure, and a data processing agreement is published and applies automatically — something our procurement office can sign without negotiation. Subprocessors for the visitor-data chain are listed with European locations, though payment and support services such as Paddle and Help Scout appear without theirs, and we found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification. The self-hosted edition keeps every record on the customer's own servers if we run it in the municipal data centre.
Simple Analytics
The contracting entity is Dutch with a chamber-of-commerce registration, hosting runs on named EU infrastructure — Hetzner in Germany, Leaseweb and Worldstream in the Netherlands, primary infrastructure in the Netherlands — and a subprocessor list with every provider's location is published alongside a data processing agreement page; visitor analytics data is stated to be collected, processed and stored by EU providers only. The list is frank about US exposure outside the analytics path: Stripe for payments, Cal.com for call scheduling, GitHub with no customer data, Mailgun with a US parent despite EU-region servers, and OpenAI or Google only after we opt in. Two captured pages give different figures for the registered company form — a private limited company with one chamber-of-commerce number, a sole proprietorship with another — and no completed security certification is published, with SOC 2 marked in progress.
Pricing transparency
Plausible Analytics
Starter is published at €9/month for up to 10k monthly pageviews, Growth at €14, Business at €19 with yearly billing giving 2 months free, and the site, team member and feature allocation per tier is unusually explicit — funnels and the stats API on Business, single sign-on and scheduled raw exports on Enterprise — while the self-hosted edition carries no fees to the vendor. However, what happens when traffic exceeds a tier, overage pricing and the Enterprise price are not publicly stated, and we found no public information on minimum contract terms or VAT treatment. For a 400,000-resident site I cannot yet compute our annual cost from the public pages alone.
Simple Analytics
A paid price of €20 per month, annual billing at two months free, a free plan with 1 user, 5 websites and one month of history with unlimited page views under fair use, a stated data-point scaling rule averaged over three months, overage handled by email notice with a week to adjust before automatic upgrade, and extra users at €20 per month give my procurement office much of the arithmetic. The rest is thin: we found no public information on which plans include the export API or at what price, on VAT treatment, or on a minimum term beyond cancel-anytime, and enterprise is custom quoted on a call.
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.