Comparison
Plausible is one of the best things to happen to web analytics. It proved that a privacy-first tool could be genuinely useful, beautifully simple, and financially sustainable without selling your visitors' data. If you're switching from Google Analytics, Plausible is a meaningful step forward.
But Plausible was built around a specific philosophy: show you what happened, cleanly and quickly, and stay out of the way. Palace was built around a different question — what do you need to actually act on your data? That difference shapes everything from the feature set to the pricing model.
Plausible starts at $9/month for 10,000 pageviews with a 30-day trial — no free tier. Palace starts free, permanently, with 100,000 events per month included. That's ten times the event volume before you spend a cent.
The more significant difference is what's included at each level. Plausible gates certain features behind higher plans and caps you at 3 sites and 3 team seats on mid-tier. Palace puts every feature on every plan with no limits on sites, seats, or team members. You're not managing a feature matrix as you grow — you just pay for what you use.
Plausible also offers self-hosting for teams who want full infrastructure control. Palace doesn't — if that's a hard requirement, Plausible has the edge here.
On the core analytics layer — pageviews, sessions, referrers, custom events, UTM tracking, real-time data, public dashboards — Plausible and Palace are closely matched. Both are fast, both are simple, and both give you what you need to understand where your traffic comes from.
The gap opens when you want to go deeper. Plausible doesn't offer user journey mapping, funnel tracking, or engagement scoring. There's no way to see the paths visitors take through your site, no way to define a conversion funnel and watch where people drop off, and no composite signal that tells you which visitors are actually engaged versus which ones bounced after ten seconds.
Palace also ships with a UTM dashboard that lets you build, manage, and track campaign links without leaving the app — and a built-in link shortener so your tracking URLs don't have to be ugly. Plausible reads UTM parameters but has no in-app tooling around them.
One place Plausible genuinely wins: it's open source. If auditability or community extensibility matters to your team, that's a real advantage Palace doesn't offer.
This is the one area where Palace and Plausible are effectively identical. Both are cookieless, both are GDPR-compliant, both are EU-hosted, and neither requires a cookie consent banner. No personal data is stored — Plausible aggregates without retaining any IP address, Palace collects no personal data by default.
If your primary reason for leaving Google Analytics is privacy compliance, either tool gets you there. The choice between them comes down to features and pricing, not privacy posture.
Choose Plausible if you want the simplest possible analytics with an open-source codebase you can audit or self-host, and you don't need to go deeper than traffic sources and pageview counts.
Choose Palace if you want to understand not just how many people visited, but what they did, where they dropped off, and which visitors were actually engaged. And if starting free with no trial clock matters — Palace lets you do that with more event volume than Plausible's paid entry tier.
Set up takes minutes. Your first 100k events are free.
Simple, usage-based pricing from $0.00