Plausible vs INSG: 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.
INSG has a permanent free tier (3 sites, 10K pageviews/month) and paid plans: Standard at $5/month for 100K views and Pro at $10/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.
INSG 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, rage clicks, dead clicks, reading speed classification, page performance scores, smart insights, timeline annotations, interactive dashboard filtering, auto channel grouping, Sankey flow diagrams, auto-detected funnels, revenue attribution via Stripe, custom domains for first-party analytics, compliance reports for 10+ frameworks, previous period comparison, CSV data export, email reports, public shared dashboards, and a Stats API. Plausible still has Google Search Console integration that we don’t — but for most site owners, INSG has everything you need and more.
Performance: a wash, mostly
Our script is comparable in size (~2 KB vs ~1.5 KB with default modules) 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 approaches differ — we use an irreversible anonymization pipeline where it’s mathematically impossible to recover individual data, while others hash IP + User-Agent with a daily rotating salt. Both prioritize privacy, though the legal classifications differ (our output is anonymous under GDPR; hash-based approaches are pseudonymous).
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.
INSG 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 INSG 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.