Plausible Analytics vs Better Stack
Privacy-first web analytics — cookieless, no GDPR/CCPA nightmare
vs. Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
Pricing tiers
Plausible Analytics
Self-Hosted (CE)
Community Edition — AGPL-licensed, run on your own infra.
$0 base (usage-based)
Starter
$9/month. 1 site. Basic dashboard, goals, 3-year data retention.
$9/mo
Growth
$14/month. 3 sites + 3 team members. Shared dashboards + team mgmt.
$14/mo
Business
$19/month. 10 sites + 10 members. Custom properties, API access, funnels, 5-year retention.
$19/mo
Enterprise
Custom. SSO, managed proxy, priority support.
Custom
Better Stack
Pay-as-you-go
Ingest $0.15/GB, retention $0.08/GB/month. Metrics $0.75/GB/month.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free
10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page. 3GB logs @ 3-day retention. 30GB metrics. 100K exceptions/mo. 5k session replays.
Free
Telemetry — Nano
$30/mo ($25 annual). 40 GB logs/traces/metrics. 30-day retention.
$30/mo
Responder License
$34/mo ($29 annual) per responder. Unlimited phone + SMS alerts. Required for on-call.
$34/mo
Telemetry — Micro
$120/mo. 160 GB.
$120/mo
Telemetry — Mega
$250/mo. 340 GB.
$250/mo
Telemetry — Tera
$500/mo. 700 GB.
$500/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing starter on Plausible Analytics vs free on Better Stack.
| Metric | Plausible Analytics | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Plausible Analytics · 16 features
- 404 Error Tracking — Auto-detect 404 pages.
- Custom Properties — Attach arbitrary properties to events (Business+).
- Email/Slack Reports — Weekly + monthly reports to email/Slack.
- File Download Tracking — Track PDF/DOC/ZIP downloads.
- Funnels — Multi-step funnel analysis (Business+).
- Goals & Conversions — Track custom events + pageview-based goals.
- Import from Google Analytics — Import historical GA data via script.
- Managed Proxy (Ent) — Proxy plausible.io through your domain to bypass ad-blockers.
- Outbound Link Tracking — One-line extension to track outbound clicks.
- Revenue Goals — Track $ amounts per goal. Great for e-commerce.
- Self-Hosting — Run via Docker. AGPL Community Edition.
- Shared Dashboards — Public or password-protected share links.
- Single-page Dashboard — All your metrics on one page: visitors, pageviews, sources, devices, countries, …
- Stats API — Pull data into your own tools via REST. Business+.
- Team Management — Owners, admins, viewers per site.
- UTM Campaigns — Track utm_source/medium/campaign automatically.
Better Stack · 13 features
- Dashboards — SQL + chart-based dashboards.
- Distributed Tracing — OpenTelemetry traces with span analysis.
- Error Tracking — Sentry-style error capture per $0.000075/exception.
- Heartbeats (Cron) — Dead-man-switch style alerts for cron/scheduled jobs.
- Logs (formerly Logtail) — Centralized structured logging with live tail + SQL.
- Metrics — Prometheus-compatible metrics ingest + visualization.
- On-Call & Incidents — Schedules, escalations, incident response with postmortems.
- Phone + SMS Alerts — Unlimited phone + SMS on Responder license.
- Reporting & Analytics — +$5/member/month add-on.
- Session Replay — Integrated with error events.
- SQL Queries over Logs — ClickHouse-backed SQL on all ingested telemetry.
- Status Pages — Hosted status pages with custom domain + brandable.
- Uptime Monitoring — HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP, UDP monitors. Global checkpoints.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Plausible Analytics | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|
| SDK | @nuxtjs/plausible + plugins, plausible-tracker (npm) | logtail-ruby, pino-logtail / winston transport, python-logtail |
| REST | Events API, Plausible Stats API, Sites Management API | Better Stack REST API, Telemetry API |
| OTHER | Tracker Script (<script>) | OTLP (OpenTelemetry), Webhooks |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Plausible Analytics and Better Stack are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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