Plausible Analytics vs PlanetScale
Privacy-first web analytics — cookieless, no GDPR/CCPA nightmare
vs. Serverless MySQL (Vitess) and Postgres at scale
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
PlanetScale
Postgres EBS single-node — PS-5
Single-node EBS, 512 MiB RAM, arm64. Entry point for Postgres.
$5/mo
Postgres EBS HA — PS-5
3-node (primary + 2 replicas), 512 MiB, arm64.
$15/mo
Vitess (non-Metal) — PS-10
Vitess MySQL sharded cluster, 1 GiB RAM.
$39/mo
Postgres Metal — M-10
3-node Metal, 1 GiB RAM + 10 GiB local storage. Much higher IOPS.
$50/mo
Vitess Metal — M-160
Vitess Metal, 16 GiB RAM + 110 GiB storage.
$609/mo
Enterprise
Custom agreements, dedicated regions, 99.99% SLA.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing starter on Plausible Analytics vs pg-ebs-nonha-starter on PlanetScale.
| Metric | Plausible Analytics | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| ha | — | 0 nodes |
| ram mib | — | 512 MiB |
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.
PlanetScale · 12 features
- Backups — Automated daily backups with retention.
- Database Branching — Git-like branches of your DB schema (not data). Create, diff, merge via deploy r…
- Deploy Requests — Schema changes in a feature branch get reviewed + auto-applied to main with zero…
- HIPAA — HIPAA-compliant deployments (Enterprise).
- Metal (NVMe) — Dedicated NVMe local storage. 10x IOPS vs EBS, latency-critical workloads.
- PgBouncer Pooler — Managed PgBouncer for Postgres clusters. Optional dedicated pooler.
- PlanetScale Boost — Query result cache with sub-ms reads.
- Point-in-Time Recovery — Restore cluster to any point within retention window.
- Postgres on PlanetScale — PostgreSQL 15+ with the same branching + deploy-request flow. Launched 2024.
- Query Insights — Per-query performance analytics, slow query tracking, explain plans.
- Read-only Regions — Route reads to the nearest region for lower latency.
- Vitess (MySQL at scale) — Horizontally-sharded MySQL (YouTube-scale) — original PlanetScale offering.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Plausible Analytics | PlanetScale |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | PlanetScale CLI (pscale) |
| SDK | @nuxtjs/plausible + plugins, plausible-tracker (npm) | @planetscale/database |
| REST | Events API, Plausible Stats API, Sites Management API | Management API |
| MCP | — | PlanetScale MCP |
| OTHER | Tracker Script (<script>) | MySQL Wire Protocol, Postgres Wire Protocol |
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