After years of wrangling with Google Analytics to try to understand which content of mine was useful (or at least popular), I recently started using Plausible for web analytics on several projects, including Everyday Rails. If you’re an independent tech author or software developer, or have the influence within your company to make the switch, Plausible’s worth checking out.
I’ve got no affiliation with Plausible. I’m just a paying customer who’s really happy with the service, and want to help spread the word about it. If nothing else, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing to help protect your privacy online.
When checking my sites’ analytics, all I care about are high-level metrics–like, which articles are popular, and which sites generally drive visitors my way. I don’t need the mountains of data offered up by Google Analytics–and if I did, I’d have no idea how to find the good bits in its increasingly cumbersome user interface! Plausible’s dashboard is super-simple. It shows trends over time, traffic source, countries, top pages, and device types. As an independent content producer, that’s all I need!
And to be honest, from a privacy standpoint, I’ve felt pretty gross about using Google Analytics for some time. Again, my needs are pretty simple. I don’t need to know what my individual visitor had for breakfast–and, frankly, neither does Google. Plausible’s built for privacy, and for a modern world with laws designed to help protect it. Major selling point, in my book.
Also! Plausible is open source and written with cool tools like Phoenix, Tailwind, and React. I appreciate that they’ve chosen to share their work and develop in the open.
Sure, unlike Google Analytics, Plausible is a paid service. But I’m all for paying software developers (like me! and you!) for their work, instead of selling out my sites’ visitors and their privacy. And I find Plausible’s pricing structure to be super-reasonable.
I hope you’ll consider Plausible for your analytics needs, too. Thanks for supporting independent software developers and technical authors!
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