The product-analytics alternative to Plausible
Plausible is excellent privacy-first web analytics. But if you need funnels, retention, user flows, and a profile per person, that’s product analytics — and Pug is the open-source, self-hostable tool for it. Here’s the honest comparison.
- You want product analytics: funnels, retention, user flows
- You need a profile per person, not just page-level traffic
- You want to autocapture clicks and forms, not just pageviews
- You want simple, privacy-friendly website traffic stats
- You want the lightest possible tracking script
- You don’t need per-user behavioral analysis
Pug vs Plausible, feature by feature
The short version: choose Pug to own and self-host focused product analytics. Plausible may be the better fit depending on what you need — the honest detail is below.
| Capability | Pug this page | Plausible |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership & operations | ||
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Deployment footprint | One Go binary | Elixir + Postgres + ClickHouse |
| Self-host price | Free forever | Free (community edition) |
| What it’s built for | ||
| Primary focus | Product analytics | Web analytics |
| Cookieless website traffic stats | Not in Pug | Yes |
| Lightweight tracking script | Not in Pug | Yes |
| Product analytics depth | ||
| Autocapture (clicks, forms, rage/dead) | Yes | No |
| Funnels with drop-off & timing | Yes | Goals only |
| Retention cohorts | Yes | No |
| User-flow Sankey & Top K | Yes | No |
| Unified person profiles + identify() | Yes | No |
| Practical | ||
| SDKs | Web, Flutter, Node | Script + a few libraries |
| Maturity | Open beta | Mature |
Plausible capabilities reflect its publicly documented product; verify the latest on the vendor’s site.
Why look for a Plausible alternative
Behavior, not just traffic
Plausible answers “how much traffic, from where?”. Pug answers “what do people do, and who comes back?” — funnels, retention cohorts, and user-flow Sankeys over raw events.
A profile per person
Pug merges anonymous and identified activity into one timeline on identify(), with traits that filter every insight. Plausible is aggregate and page-centric by design.
Autocapture interactions
Clicks, scrolls, form submits, rage and dead clicks are captured after one init() — far beyond pageviews and manual goals.
Where Plausible is still the better choice
Pug is a focused tool, not a platform. If your team needs any of the following, Plausible is the better fit — these don’t ship in Pug:
- Simple, privacy-first website traffic analytics
- Cookieless tracking with no banner needed
- An ultra-light tracking script
- A clean single-page traffic dashboard
- Years of maturity and wide adoption
Focused product analytics, fully yours
Everything below ships today and runs the same whether you self-host or use the free cloud.
Autocapture out of the box
Page views, clicks, scrolls, form submits, plus rage and dead clicks — captured after one init(), then enriched with geo, device, and UTM on ingest.
Six insight types
Trends, Funnels, Retention cohorts, Segmentation, User-flow Sankey, and Top-K — all over raw events, filterable by any property.
Unified profiles
Anonymous events merge into one person on identify(). Traits like plan or email live on the profile and filter every insight, across devices.
Dashboards
KPI, line, area, bar, table, and Sankey tiles on one shared time window, with period-over-period comparison and threshold coloring.
Moving from Plausible to Pug
Pug’s model is straightforward: events with properties, a person per user via identify(), and traits that filter every insight.
SDKs available today are Web (TypeScript), Flutter (Dart), and Node — native mobile and React Native are on the roadmap. Point your tracking calls at Pug, identify users where you already identify them in Plausible, and anonymous history merges into a single profile. For setup steps and the API, see the SDKs page and the docs.
Plausible alternative — your questions
Is Pug a Plausible alternative?
Only partly — they serve different needs. Plausible is privacy-first web analytics (traffic, sources, pages). Pug is product analytics (behavior, funnels, retention, profiles). If you want website traffic stats, Plausible is excellent; if you want to understand product usage per person, choose Pug.
Are both open source and self-hostable?
Yes. Both Pug and Plausible are AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted. Plausible’s self-host runs on Elixir with Postgres and ClickHouse; Pug runs as a single Go binary with Postgres, ClickHouse, and NATS.
Is Pug as lightweight as Plausible?
No. Plausible is deliberately minimal — a tiny script and a single dashboard. Pug captures far more (clicks, forms, custom events) to power product analysis, so it does more work by design.
Can I use both?
Yes — many teams run a privacy-friendly web analytics tool for marketing traffic and a product analytics tool for in-app behavior. They answer different questions.
Does my data stay on my servers?
With either tool, self-hosting keeps your data on your own infrastructure. That’s a core reason teams pick open-source analytics.
Own your product analytics.
Open source, self-hostable on one Go binary, and free during open beta. Start a project and see live events in minutes.