The best Plausible alternatives & competitors, compared
Contents
1. PostHog
- Founded: 2020
- Similar to: Heap, Matomo
- Typical users: Engineers and product teams
- Typical customers: Mid-size B2Bs and startups


What is PostHog?
PostHog (that's us π) is an open-source platform combining web analytics, product analytics, session replay, A/B testing, feature flags, and user surveys into one product. This means it's not only an alternative to Plausible but also tools like Mixpanel, Hotjar, and LaunchDarkly.
According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 5,330 of the top 1 million websites deploy PostHog, significantly more than the 3,500 using Plausible.
Key features
π Web analytics: Monitor your web traffic by automatically capturing and calculating metrics like visitors, pageviews, session duration, and bounce rate. See the sources, entry and exit paths, channels, and more.
π Product analytics: Custom trends, funnels, user paths, retention analysis, and segment user cohorts. Also, direct SQL querying for power users.
πΊ Session replays: View exactly how users are using your site. Includes event timelines, console logs, network activity, and 90-day data retention.
π¬ Surveys: Target surveys by event or user properties. Templates for net promoter score (NPS), product-market fit (PMF) surveys, and more.
π§ͺ A/B tests: Optimize your app and website with up to nine test variations and track impact on primary and secondary metrics. Automatically calculate test duration, sample size, and statistical significance.
How does PostHog compare to Plausible?
Plausible focuses on web analytics. PostHog includes web analytics but also offers a full suite of tools to help you build a better site and product. On top of this, you can use all of the features of PostHog for free forever. Plausible costs a minimum of $9/month.
PostHog | Plausible | |
Free tier Free forever option, no credit card required | β | β |
Web analytics Pre-built dashboard of aggregate traffic, sources, campaigns, and session metrics | β | β |
Conversions Track conversions towards a goal metric with funnels | β | β |
Open source Audit code, contribute to roadmap, and build integrations | β | β |
EU hosting Store your data in the EU for compliance | β | β |
Cookieless tracking Option to track without using cookies | β | β |
Product analytics Create custom dashboards, trends, funnels, paths, and retention | β | β |
Custom events Manually capture custom events and properties wherever they happen | β | β |
User profiles Capture and analyze data at the user-level | β | β |
Cohort analysis Combine users into cohorts for analysis | β | β |
Session replay Watch real users on your site; discover friction points | β | β |
Reverse proxy Official instructions to capture more accurate data by avoiding tracking blockers | β | β |
Why do companies use PostHog?
According to reviews on G2, companies use PostHog because:
It replaces multiple tools: PostHog can replace Plausible (web analytics), Amplitude (product analytics), and Fullstory (session replay). This simplifies workflows and ensures product data is all in one place.
Pricing is transparent and scalable: Reviewers appreciate how PostHog's pricing scales as they grow. There's a generous free tier they can use forever. Companies eligible for PostHog for Startups also get $50k in additional free credits.
They need a complete picture of users: PostHog includes every tool necessary to understand users and improve products. This means creating funnels to track conversion, watching replays to see where users get stuck, testing solutions with A/B tests, and gathering feedback with user surveys.
Bottom line
Because PostHog is free, has web analytics and more, and still has the privacy and compliance features Plausible offers, it makes for a great alternative, especially for developers and startups.
2. Fathom
- Founded: 2018
- Similar to: Plausible, Google Analytics
- Typical users: Founders and content teams
- Typical customers: Privacy-conscious, content-focused websites
What is Fathom?
Fathom is a privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative. It is a simple web analytics tool that captures details on traffic, sessions, referrers, sources, and campaigns. It does this while helping users stay compliant and avoid cookies.
According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 1,832 of the top 1 million websites deploy Fathom. This is just under half of Plausible's 3,500.
Key features
π§βπ¨ Simple web analytics: Fathom provides a simple, GA-like experience to monitor your website and get an overview of your traffic.
πͺ Cookieless: Avoid cookie banners and track your site without using cookies.
π Marketing metrics: Track the sources, devices, browsers, locations, UTMs, and more for your traffic.
β Conversions: Track custom events and analyze them as conversions towards a goal.
How does Fathom compare to Plausible?
Feature-wise, Plausible and Fathom are nearly identical. Looking closer, however, Fathom is missing some of the compliance features Plausible offers, like open source code.
Fathom | Plausible | |
Free tier Free forever option, no credit card required | β | β |
Web analytics Pre-built dashboard of aggregate traffic, sources, campaigns, and session metrics | β | β |
Conversions Track conversions towards a goal metric with funnels | β | β |
Open source Audit code, contribute to roadmap, and build integrations | β | β |
EU hosting Store your data in the EU for compliance | β | β |
Cookieless tracking Option to track without using cookies | β | β |
Product analytics Create custom dashboards, trends, funnels, paths, and retention | β | β |
Custom events Manually capture custom events and properties wherever they happen | Events only | β |
User profiles Capture and analyze data at the user-level | β | β |
Cohort analysis Combine users into cohorts for analysis | β | β |
Session replay Watch real users on your site; discover friction points | β | β |
Reverse proxy Official instructions to capture more accurate data by avoiding tracking blockers | β | β |
π‘ Good to know: Fathom isn't entirely EU hosted, but instead attempts to stay compliant with European regulation by:
- Being a Canadian company. The European Commission determined that Canada has an adequate level of data protection.
- Having EU isolation so visitor data is routed and stored on EU servers.
- Having a data processing agreement (DPA) available.
Why do companies use Fathom?
Fathom has limited reviews on G2, but much more praise on social. Judging from social posts, the main reasons people choose Fathom are:
Privacy-focus: Fathom reviewers almost always praise its focus on privacy. This allows users to stay compliant with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and more.
Ease of use: Reviewers find Fathom is simple to set up and simple to understand. Less technical users find this especially helpful.
Migration from GA: Thanks to both its Google Analytics importer and its relatively similar interface, reviewers find the migration from GA to Fathom relatively easy.
Bottom line
Fathom and Plausible both provide a simple web analytics experience. Depending on your regulatory needs, it is one to consider, but it is missing some of the features users choose Plausible for.
3. Matomo
- Founded: 2007
- Similar to: Piwik Pro, Google Analytics
- Typical users: Marketing and ecommerce teams
- Typical customers: Privacy-focused former GA users
What is Matomo?
Matomo is a fully-featured, privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative. It contains basic web analytics along with more advanced product and behavioral analytics features. This includes features like funnels, cohorts, session recordings, and heatmaps.
According to BuiltWith, as of October 2024, 20,816 of the top 1 million websites deploy Matomo. This is nearly seven times more than the 3,500 who use Plausible.
Key features
π Web analytics: Get an overview of your traffic, popular pages, sources, referrers, and more.
π Custom reports: Get detailed reports on product usage, cohorts, funnels, and conversion goals.
π Marketing analysis: Combine traffic insights with channel attribution, keyword data, ad performance, and more.
πΈ Ecommerce: Integrate with popular ecommerce platforms and track sales, products, and conversions.
How does Matomo compare to Plausible?
Matomo is more of a like-for-like alternative to Google Analytics, meaning it has many more features than Plausible. Both are also privacy-focused, open source, and only have trials, not free tiers.
Matomo | Plausible | |
Free tier Free forever option, no credit card required | β | β |
Web analytics Pre-built dashboard of aggregate traffic, sources, campaigns, and session metrics | β | β |
Conversions Track conversions towards a goal metric with funnels | β | β |
Open source Audit code, contribute to roadmap, and build integrations | β | β |
EU hosting Store your data in the EU for compliance | β | β |
Cookieless tracking Option to track without using cookies | β | β |
Product analytics Create custom dashboards, trends, funnels, paths, and retention | β | β |
Custom events Manually capture custom events and properties wherever they happen | β | β |
User profiles Capture and analyze data at the user-level | β | β |
Cohort analysis Combine users into cohorts for analysis | β | β |
Session replay Watch real users on your site; discover friction points | β | β |
Reverse proxy Official instructions to capture more accurate data by avoiding tracking blockers | β | β |
Why do companies use Matomo?
According to reviews on G2, people choose Matomo because:
On-premise: Reviews appreciate that Matomo can be hosted and run from your own servers, keeping them in full control of their data.
Privacy: Matomo is open-source, self-hostable, and community-focused. The combination of these creates a privacy-focused platform reviewers appreciate.
GA-like: Matomo's feature set is very similar to Google Analytics. This means users can do the analysis they are familiar with on a more privacy-friendly platform.
Bottom line
Matomo is a solid alternative to Plausible thanks to its similar, but expanded feature set and focus on privacy. For advanced Google Analytics users, it's an especially good choice.
4. Heap
- Founded: 2013
- Similar to: PostHog, LogRocket
- Typical users: Product and marketing teams
- Typical customers: B2C SaaS and ecommerce companies with a user experience focus.
What is Heap?
Heap describes itself as a digital insights platform. This means it offers both product analytics and session replay and supports marketing use cases with multi-touch attribution. Contentsquare, a marketing and ecommerce analytics firm, acquired Heap in September 2023 and announced plans to integrate the two products.
According to BuiltWith, a similar number of users deploy both Heap and Plausible. As of October 2024, 2,824 of the top 1 million websites deploy Heap while 3,500 use Plausible.
Key features
β Event autocapture: Product teams don't need to rely on engineers to instrument all events. Heap has a visual editor for teams to tag events directly on-page for analysis.
πΊ Session replay: Get qualitative insights about user behavior by replaying their session - although this lacks the debugging tools typical of most replay tools.
π₯ Heatmaps: See where people click, what point they scroll to, and the areas that get the most attention.
π€ Analysis suggestions: Advanced data science capabilities discover hidden interactions, friction points, and knowledge about key paths.
π Managed ETL: Connect to data warehouses, so you can combine your analytics with other sources and get a fuller picture of the entire user journey.
How does Heap compare to Plausible?
Heap has much more of a product focus than Plausible. This means it lacks the easy-to-use web analytics features, but makes up for it with product analytics, session replay, and more. It also isn't open source or hostable in the EU.
Heap | Plausible | |
Free tier Free forever option, no credit card required | β | β |
Web analytics Pre-built dashboard of aggregate traffic, sources, campaigns, and session metrics | β | β |
Conversions Track conversions towards a goal metric with funnels | β | β |
Open source Audit code, contribute to roadmap, and build integrations | β | β |
EU hosting Store your data in the EU for compliance | β | β |
Cookieless tracking Option to track without using cookies | β | β |
Product analytics Create custom dashboards, trends, funnels, paths, and retention | β | β |
Custom events Manually capture custom events and properties wherever they happen | β | β |
User profiles Capture and analyze data at the user-level | β | β |
Cohort analysis Combine users into cohorts for analysis | β | β |
Session replay Watch real users on your site; discover friction points | β |