Do I need a cookie banner with Plausible?

Plausible sets no cookies and keeps no identifier that would let it recognise a visitor across visits. On that basis, audience measurement does not require consent. The legal assessment for your site remains yours, especially if other trackers are present on the page.

Is the self-hosted version cut down compared with the paid offering?

The community edition carries the core of the tool: dashboard, goals, custom events, sharing. Some features of the hosted offering arrive later or are not carried over. In exchange, you do not pay per page view.

Can I migrate my data from Google Analytics?

No — there is no GA4 import, and the data models differ too much for a reconciliation to be trustworthy. Common practice is to run both in parallel for a few weeks, then switch GA4 off and keep its export as an archive.

What is the practical difference with Umami?

Both measure without cookies and read on one page. Plausible goes further on campaign analysis, revenue attribution and email reports, and holds up better under load thanks to ClickHouse. Umami is leaner and starts on a VPS four times smaller. For a blog, Umami is enough; for a commercial site running campaigns, Plausible is the better fit.

Are my statistics backed up?

They live in your VPS's PostgreSQL and ClickHouse volumes, covered by your ServOrbit server's automatic backup. For an off-server copy, back up both volumes: PostgreSQL alone does not contain the events.

Measure your site's audience, privacy-friendly — shared (instant) or dedicated on your VPS.

Plausible

Clean, cookie-free and GDPR-compliant analytics — everything fits on a single dashboard.

2 GB RAM 2 vCPU Port 8000 Available

Source code

Tech stack

DockerPostgreSQLClickHouse

Minimum RAM2 GB

Minimum CPU2 vCPU

Default port8000

Compatible OSChoice of Linux distributions

Plausible makes an unusual bet: everything that matters should fit on one page. Traffic sources, top pages, countries, devices, goals and conversion rates are read at a glance, with no tree of reports to navigate. It is a deliberate design choice, and it is what makes the tool readable by a whole team rather than only by the person who configured it.

Measurement is cookie-free and uses no persistent identifier: no visitor is tracked from one site to the next, and no personal data is stored. On your own VPS, the community edition relies on PostgreSQL for configuration and ClickHouse for events — that column-oriented store is what keeps dashboards instant at high volume, and it is also why 2 GB of RAM are required at start-up.

Key features

A single dashboard: traffic, sources, pages, countries, devices and goals

Cookie-free and with no persistent identifier — no consent banner required

Tracking script of roughly 1 KB, the lightest in the catalogue

Goals, custom events and revenue attribution

Weekly or monthly email reports, plus a public sharing link

UTM tags read natively for campaign tracking

When to use this solution?

1

Product or marketing team

Show one dashboard the whole team can read, with no training and no custom report configuration.

2

High-traffic site

ClickHouse absorbs high event volumes while keeping the display instant, where a classic relational database starts to struggle.

3

Strict compliance requirement

No cookies, no personal data, hosted on your own server in Europe: the processing chain documents itself in three lines.

Deploy Plausible on your VPS

Guide optimized for ServOrbit Cloud VPS.

01

Create the VPS

Plan for 2 GB RAM and 2 vCPU minimum: Plausible runs three containers (application, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse). The "Plausible" template installs the whole set in one step.

02

Set the public address

Before first start-up, the instance's public address must be the one you will actually reach it on: it is what builds sharing links and email reports.

03

Create the account and first site

Open your domain on port 8000. The community edition creates the administrator account on first access, then asks for the domain you want to measure.

04

Add the script and verify

Paste the provided script before </head>, then visit a page from another browser: the real-time visitor counter should react within seconds.

Frequently asked questions

Because the stack is not the same. Plausible stores events in ClickHouse, a column-oriented database that reserves memory to keep aggregations instant at high volume. Umami writes to PostgreSQL alone. It is a trade-off: more RAM at rest, but dashboards that do not slow down as traffic grows.

Embed the deploy button

Maintaining a project that uses Plausible? This button lets your readers deploy it on a VPS in one click, without reading Docker documentation.

Markdown

[![Deploy Plausible on ServOrbit](https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg)](https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=analytics-plausible&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=analytics-plausible)

HTML

<a href="https://servorbit.com/vps-cloud?template=analytics-plausible&utm_source=deploy-badge&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=analytics-plausible"><img src="https://servorbit.com/brand/deploy/button.svg" alt="Deploy Plausible on ServOrbit" height="40"></a>

The button points to a VPS order with the template preselected. The image is served from servorbit.com — nothing to host on your side.