# 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.

_Published June 2026 · 5 min read · https://abacuslytics.com/blog/abacus-vs-plausible_

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.