PulseDog vs Plausible

Plausible is a great product. The team has done genuinely important work normalising the idea that web analytics does not have to mean cookies, banners, and consent gaps. PulseDog sits in the same category — lightweight, privacy-first, cookieless — with a different set of trade-offs around free-tier generosity, hosting jurisdiction, and dashboard density. This page lays out where we agree with Plausible, where we differ, and where they may simply be the better fit for your project.

At a glance

What we agree on

Plausible and PulseDog are part of the same philosophical movement and we are not shy about saying so. Both products refuse cookies, refuse persistent visitor identifiers, refuse to sell or share your data, and refuse to make your dashboard a punishment. Both are GDPR- and ePrivacy-compatible without a consent banner. Both publish a tracking script that is well under 1 KB. If you have used one, you will feel at home in the other within five minutes.

So the real comparison is not “privacy versus surveillance” — that argument is settled. It is about which set of trade-offs fits your project.

Where Plausible may fit better

We will not pretend Plausible is worse at things it is genuinely better at:

• Open source. Plausible Community Edition is published under AGPL. If your organisation requires the ability to read, audit, fork, or self-host the analytics code, PulseDog is not the right choice — we are a closed-source managed cloud service.
• Track record. Plausible has been in market since 2019 with a sizable customer base, public revenue numbers, and a long-running OSS community. PulseDog is younger.
• Goals and conversions as first-class concepts. Plausible has a dedicated Goals UI on top of custom events with attribution shortcuts. In PulseDog you track the same thing with custom events and read them in the dashboard, but the workflow is more manual.

If any of those are deal-breakers, Plausible is a fine product and we will not try to talk you out of it.

Where PulseDog fits better

The reasons our customers pick PulseDog over Plausible cluster around three things:

1. A real free plan, not a trial

Plausible offers a 30-day free trial and then asks for payment. PulseDog’s free plan is permanent: 3,000 pageviews per month, every month, no credit card, no expiry. For side projects, blogs, portfolios, indie SaaS in early validation, and anything else that does not yet justify a monthly subscription, that difference is the difference between “I have analytics” and “I will set this up later.”

2. Hosted in Germany

Both products are EU-friendly, but the location matters more than people sometimes admit. Germany has the strictest data-protection regime in the EU (BDSG layered on top of GDPR), and German hosting is the easiest answer to give a procurement team or DPO who is allergic to surprises. Plausible Cloud runs in the EU as well, but if your buyer specifically asks for German servers, PulseDog gives you a one-line answer.

3. A denser dashboard

Plausible’s UI is famously minimal — which is wonderful for some users and a frustration for others. PulseDog’s dashboard puts more on screen by default: realtime, top pages, top referrers, devices, browsers, OS, languages, countries, custom events, and campaign breakdowns are all visible without clicking through tabs. If you prefer to scan a single page rather than navigate, that is the design we optimised for.

4. Sharing the dashboard on every plan

PulseDog ships password-protected and fully public dashboards on every plan, including the free tier — useful for indie founders sharing numbers with investors, agencies sharing a client view, or open-data sites publishing their own traffic. Plausible’s equivalent “shared link” feature is gated to the Growth plan and up.

Migration from Plausible

The technical migration is trivial: install the PulseDog snippet, leave both running for a billing cycle so your numbers can be reconciled, then remove the Plausible script. PulseDog does not import historical Plausible data — the practical advice is to keep your last Plausible billing period as a CSV export for the record and start the new account fresh.

If you are coming from a Plausible custom-events setup, the mapping is direct: each Plausible event becomes a PulseDog custom event with the same name and an optional numeric value.

Pricing

Two real differences here, and they go in opposite directions.

At the bottom of the curve, PulseDog has a forever-free plan covering 3,000 pageviews per month with no credit card. Plausible asks for payment after a 30-day trial. For side projects and validation-stage products that is the difference between “I have analytics” and “I will set this up later.”

At the entry paid tier, the per-pageview value is also in PulseDog’s favour: our Business plan is €7.90 / month for 100,000 pageviews, while Plausible’s starter plan is $9 / month for 10,000 pageviews. If you scale, that gap matters — on the same monthly budget you get roughly an order of magnitude more pageview headroom. Plausible becomes price-competitive again at higher tiers and on annual billing, so the cost case depends on where you sit on the curve. See PulseDog pricing.

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