Plausible vs HushStats: Which One Should You Pick?

We get asked this a lot, so let’s be upfront: Plausible is a great product. They’ve been around longer, they have more features, and they basically created the privacy-first analytics category. If you pick Plausible over us, you’re making a solid choice.

That said, we exist for a reason. Here’s where the two actually differ.

Price is the big one

Plausible starts at $9/month for 10K pageviews and doesn’t have a free plan — just a 30-day trial. At 100K pageviews, you’re paying $19/month. At 1M, it’s $69.

HushStats has a permanent free tier (3 sites, 10K pageviews/month) and paid plans at $5/month for 100K views and $12/month for 1M. If you’re running a personal blog or a side project that doesn’t make money yet, the difference between $0 and $9/month matters. And at higher traffic, the gap gets wider.

We’re not trying to undercut Plausible for the sake of it — their pricing reflects a larger team, more features, and EU hosting. We just have lower costs because we run on edge infrastructure instead of dedicated servers.

Features: Plausible wins on depth

Plausible has goals, conversion tracking, funnels, custom properties, revenue tracking, and Google Search Console integration. If those things matter to you — and if you’re running a business where conversion tracking drives decisions — Plausible is the better tool today. No contest.

HushStats covers all the core stuff and then some: visitors, pageviews, top pages, referrers, countries, browsers, devices, custom events, outbound link tracking, file download tracking, 404 error detection, UTM campaign tracking, Core Web Vitals, scroll depth analysis, page performance scores, smart insights, timeline annotations, interactive dashboard filtering, auto channel grouping, previous period comparison, CSV data export, public shared dashboards, and a Stats API. Plausible still has funnels, revenue tracking, and Search Console integration that we don’t — but for most site owners, HushStats has everything you need.

Performance: a wash, mostly

Our script is slightly smaller (<1 KB vs ~1.5 KB) and we run on a global edge network, so latency is consistently low worldwide. Plausible runs on EU servers, which means great performance in Europe and slightly higher latency elsewhere.

In practice, both scripts are so small that neither will meaningfully affect your page load time. This isn’t the deciding factor.

Privacy: both do it right

Neither tool sets cookies. Neither stores IP addresses. Neither tracks users across sites. Neither requires a consent banner. The technical implementations differ — we use an HTTP header technique for visitor estimation, Plausible hashes IP + User-Agent with a daily rotating salt — but the privacy outcome is the same.

Open source vs hosted

Plausible is open source (AGPL) and self-hostable. If you want to audit the code, run it on your own infrastructure, or avoid trusting a third party with your data, that’s a meaningful advantage.

HushStats is a hosted service. If self-hosting matters to you, Plausible or Umami are better options.

So who should use what?

If you’re a business that needs conversion tracking, funnels, or Search Console integration — pick Plausible.

If you’re an indie dev, blogger, or small site owner who wants simple traffic stats without paying $9+/month — we built HushStats for you. The free plan doesn’t expire, the dashboard shows you what matters, and setup takes one line of HTML.

Both tools are miles better than Google Analytics for anyone who cares about their visitors’ privacy. You can’t really go wrong.