Why We Built a Plausible Alternative

Let's Start With What Plausible Does Well

This post is not a hit piece. Plausible Analytics is a genuinely good product. The founding team (Uku Täht and Marko Saric) built something important: a European, open-source, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics at a time when the market offered very little in that direction.

Plausible gets a lot right:

• No cookies, no consent banner required. Plausible does not use cookies or store personal data. That's a serious advantage over GA4 and most traditional tools.
• EU-based infrastructure. Plausible runs on servers in Germany and France, which matters for GDPR compliance and for teams that have strict data residency requirements.
• Open source. The core product is open source (AGPL-3.0). You can audit it, contribute to it, or self-host it on your own infrastructure.
• Clean, readable dashboard. Plausible's single-page dashboard is genuinely nice. Pageviews, unique visitors, bounce rate, top sources, and top pages are all visible at once without drilling through report menus.
• Custom events and goals. Goal and conversion tracking is available on all plans, which is a meaningful feature for teams tracking signups, purchases, or other key actions.

If Plausible's pricing works for you and you want EU data residency, it is a sound choice. We are not trying to argue otherwise.

Where Plausible Falls Short — Especially Early On

Plausible's main challenge is pricing positioning. The entry plan starts at $9/month (billed annually) or $12/month billed monthly. That covers up to 10,000 monthly pageviews across unlimited sites.

For a team doing $100k+ ARR, $9/month is nothing. But that's not who hits this constraint. The people most likely to be comparing Plausible alternatives are:

• Solo developers running side projects that might get 2,000–8,000 pageviews per month
• Content creators or bloggers building an audience who aren't yet monetizing
• Early-stage founders running experiments before product-market fit
• Open-source maintainers who want basic traffic visibility on their project site

For these cases, $9/month adds up. It's $108/year for a tool that's measuring early, uncertain traffic. That's a real barrier when you're not sure the project will survive.

The self-hosting option exists but comes with real costs: you need a server (typically $5–20/month on Hetzner or similar), time to set up Plausible's Docker stack, and ongoing maintenance responsibility. For teams that want simple analytics, "just self-host it" is not actually simple.

What Plausible Does That Beam Does Not (Yet)

Honesty matters here. Plausible is a more mature product with features Beam doesn't have:

• Revenue tracking. Plausible supports ecommerce revenue attribution. Beam does not have a native revenue dimension.
• Funnels. Plausible's growth plan includes conversion funnels. Beam has goal/conversion tracking but not visual funnel reports.
• User segments and cohorts. Plausible's higher plans allow filtering and segmentation by custom properties. Beam's filtering is simpler.
• EU data residency guarantee. Plausible explicitly operates on EU infrastructure. Beam runs on Cloudflare Workers, which distributes compute globally — that's a trade-off some teams care about.
• Integrations. Plausible has more documented integrations with third-party platforms. Beam's integration guides cover the most common cases but not everything.

If any of those features are critical to your workflow, Plausible is likely the better choice for you right now.

Why We Built Beam Differently

When we started thinking about Beam, we weren't trying to clone Plausible. We were trying to answer a different question: what does analytics look like for a project that's still finding its footing?

For that stage, we think a few things matter most:

• Free tier that's actually useful. Beam's free plan covers one site and up to 50,000 pageviews per month. That covers most early-stage projects without any payment friction.
• $5/month when you need more. The Pro plan is $5/month for unlimited sites and up to 500,000 pageviews. It's priced for builders who want a small tool, not a subscription that scales faster than their product does.
• No self-hosting overhead. Beam runs on Cloudflare's infrastructure. There's nothing to maintain. Add a script tag, see your data.
• Decision-ready output. We built around a principle that raw pageview counters are a starting point, not the finish line. Insights, anomaly detection, and channel classification are designed to surface the things that actually change what you do next.

We are not arguing Beam is better than Plausible in all dimensions. We're arguing that for a specific audience — early projects, indie developers, small teams watching costs — Beam's trade-offs are a better fit.

Feature Comparison: Beam vs. Plausible

The Pricing Math

Here's how the cost stacks up over time at different project scales:

• Under 50K pageviews/month: Beam is free. Plausible costs $9/month ($108/year).
• 50K–500K pageviews/month: Beam Pro is $5/month ($60/year). Plausible's 100K plan is $9/month; their 200K plan is $19/month.
• Above 500K pageviews/month: You'll likely outgrow both tools. At that scale, evaluate Plausible, Fathom, or self-hosted Matomo based on your specific requirements.

The $5/month vs $9/month difference sounds small in isolation. Across a year, it's $108 vs $60 — a 44% difference. That matters when you're running multiple projects or watching early-stage costs closely.

Who Should Use Plausible Instead of Beam

We're not trying to win every customer. If any of the following describe your situation, Plausible is probably the better fit:

• You need confirmed EU data residency (GDPR with explicit EU processing location)
• You need open-source software you can audit or contribute to
• You need revenue attribution or multi-step funnels
• You want the option to self-host later without a platform migration
• Your site has more than 500K monthly pageviews (you'll hit Beam's Pro limit)

Who Should Consider Beam

• Early-stage projects that want free analytics without self-hosting overhead
• Indie developers tracking multiple small sites without paying per-site fees
• Founders who want proactive traffic alerts without checking a dashboard constantly
• Teams who want the simplest possible setup: script tag, no configuration, data in 60 seconds
• Anyone who finds $9/month hard to justify for traffic that's still ramping up

Further Reading

• Beam vs. Plausible: detailed feature comparison
• Google Analytics alternatives in 2026 — broader market overview
• Cookie-free analytics guide — how privacy-first analytics works under the hood
• Migrating from Plausible to Beam — step-by-step guide