Abacus vs. Plausible
We love Plausible — it helped make privacy-first analytics mainstream. Here's where Abacus is similar, where it differs, and how to choose.
Let’s be clear up front: Plausible is excellent. It helped prove that privacy-first analytics could be simple, beautiful, and a real business — and it’s open source, which we admire. If you’re choosing between Abacus and Plausible, you’re already choosing well. This is about the differences in philosophy and emphasis.
Where we agree
Abacus and Plausible share the same core values, and it shows in the product:
- No cookies, and no consent banner required.
- No personal data collected; visitors counted with a salted, rotating hash.
- A tiny script — kilobytes, not tens of kilobytes.
- A clean, single-page dashboard instead of a labyrinth of reports.
- Open source, so you can read the code and self-host.
If those are your requirements, both tools deliver. So the question becomes: what do you want the tool to feel like day to day?
Where Abacus leans different
The daily email is the product, not an add-on
Plausible can send you weekly or monthly email reports. With Abacus, the daily email is the headline feature. Our whole pitch is “real analytics, sent to your inbox every morning” — a short, well-designed digest of yesterday that’s good enough that many people never open the dashboard at all. If you want analytics that come to you rather than a habit you have to maintain, that’s the difference.
Built on the edge, priced to start small
Abacus runs entirely on Cloudflare’s edge — the tracker, the ingest endpoint, the dashboard, and the nightly rollup all live in one Worker. That keeps it fast worldwide and lets us offer a genuinely free tier for a single site, with paid plans starting at $9/mo. Plausible is subscription-only (its cloud has no permanent free tier), though you can always self-host it for free.
Opinionated simplicity
Both dashboards are minimal. Abacus deliberately ships fewer knobs: the metrics we think matter, presented one way, with sensible defaults. That’s a feature if you want zero setup, and a limitation if you love deep segmentation. Plausible has had more years to add depth — goals, funnels, and richer filtering are more mature there today.
| Abacus | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie-free | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes (AGPL) | Yes (AGPL) |
| Daily email digest | Core feature | Weekly/monthly |
| Free cloud tier | Yes (1 site) | No (trial only) |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Funnels & deep segments | Lean | More mature |
| Runs on | Cloudflare edge | Your/their servers |
How to choose
Choose Plausible if you want a proven product with deeper goal/funnel features and you’re happy on a paid plan or self-hosting a Postgres/ClickHouse stack.
Choose Abacus if the daily email is the dream, you want to start free on a single site, and you like the idea of analytics that live on the edge and stay out of your way. Same values, slightly different center of gravity.