mcp-analytics vs Plausible Analytics (2026)

Updated 2026-07-17 · All comparisons

When mcp-analytics

mcp-analytics

Live in Claude or ChatGPT all day and want stats without opening another tab. EU-hosted, free up to 100k hits/mo (Plausible has no free tier), bot/AI-crawler taxonomy.

When Plausible

Plausible

Want a polished dashboard your team can open and skim in 30 seconds. Open-source, EU-hosted, mature product with a strong brand and a Twitter community.

Feature	mcp-analytics	Plausible
Price entry point	Free 100k hits/mo, no card. €19/mo for 10M hits.	No free tier (30-day trial). $9/mo for 10k pageviews, $19/mo for 100k.
Hits at the $19 price	10,000,000 hits / month	100,000 pageviews / month
Open source	Proprietary.	Yes, AGPL. Self-hostable.
Dashboard UI	None. MCP-only interface.	Polished, fast, single-page. The benchmark.
MCP server	Yes, primary interface. 23 tools, OAuth 2.1 with PKCE.	No official one. (Community servers exist; Sentry hosts one at plausible-mcp.sentry.dev.)
EU hosting	EU-hosted in Germany.	EU-hosted in Germany.
Cookieless	Yes, by default.	Yes by default.
Custom events	First-class, server-side SDK on Pro tier.	Yes, JS plus a server-side Events API.
AI / bot taxonomy	8 traffic classes including ai_user_action, ai_training, ai_search, search_index.	Filters bots silently; AI referrers visible as channel.
Data retention	1 year (Free) / 3 years (Pro) / custom (Enterprise).	3 years (Starter, Growth) / 5 years (Business) / custom (Enterprise).
Sites included	Unlimited on all tiers.	1 (Starter) / 3 (Growth) / 10 (Business).

Plausible is the most-cited reason indie founders switch off Google Analytics. They’ve earned it: open-source, EU-hosted, polished UI, no cookies. We have huge respect for what they’ve built.

But Plausible and mcp-analytics aren’t direct substitutes. We solve a different version of the same problem. Honest case for each:

Where Plausible is genuinely better

The dashboard. Plausible’s UI is the cleanest analytics dashboard on the market. Period. If you want to share your stats with a non-technical colleague who needs to click through a few visualizations and walk away with a feeling for the site, you want Plausible. We have no UI; we will never have a dashboard.

Open source and self-hostable. Plausible is AGPL. You can run it on your own hardware, contribute to the codebase, fork it if you don’t like a decision. We are proprietary. Good reasons exist for both stances. If open-source matters to you ideologically or operationally, Plausible wins.

Maturity. Plausible has been live since 2019, has thousands of paying customers, has shipped through every regulatory shift in EU privacy law. We’re newer. They have a community on Twitter, a vibrant GitHub, plugins, integrations. We have a small EU server and a Stripe account.

Longer retention at the entry point. Plausible keeps 3 years of data on Starter and Growth, 5 on Business. We keep 1 year on Free, 3 on Pro. Paid-to-paid it’s roughly a wash (3 vs 3), but their entry plan beats our free tier on this axis, and their Business tier holds data longer than our Pro.

Where we’re genuinely better

The free tier. Plausible has no free tier. 30-day trial, and then it’s $9/month for 10k pageviews. Our free is 100,000 hits/month, unlimited sites (Plausible caps sites per plan: 1 on Starter, 3 on Growth, 10 on Business), all 23 MCP tools, no card. For most indie projects, that’s the difference between “tried once” and “still using it two years later.”

The 100x volume at $19. At $19/month, you get 10M hits with us and 100k with Plausible. Not a small delta. A 100x ratio. If you have a popular newsletter or a Hacker News-prone blog, you’ll hit Plausible’s $19 ceiling on a single viral day.

MCP-native interface. The actual reason we exist. You ask “how did mysite.com do last week?” in Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor. You get a sentence back. No dashboard, no tab-switching, no UI to learn. Plausible’s API and Looker Studio integration exist, but neither is a chat interface.

You: "Top referrers for mysite.com this week, anything new?"
Claude: "Three new referrers this week: dev.to (84 visits, post about
        your Friday article), Bluesky (62, mostly from one thread),
        and r/selfhosted (147, your DSGVO piece got linked)."

Bot and AI crawler visibility. We have eight traffic classes, including dedicated buckets for AI training crawlers (ai_training: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot), AI answer crawlers (ai_search: PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot), AI user-mediated browsing (ai_user_action: Claude or ChatGPT fetching a page on a user’s behalf), and search-engine bots (search_index). Plausible filters bots silently. You can’t see how much of your traffic is GPTBot indexing you for ChatGPT search. We can.

Server-side tracking that classifies AI crawlers. Fair is fair: Plausible has a server-side Events API too (documented for backend and mobile events), so backend tracking is possible there. The difference is what you get out of the box. Our server-side tracking (an HTTP ingest endpoint authenticated with a per-site secret, plus a first-party Rack middleware for Ruby) auto-captures requests and classifies the AI crawlers the JS beacon never sees. With Plausible’s endpoint you construct each event yourself, and bots stay filtered. npm wrappers and a GitHub Action for deploy-regression checks are on our roadmap.

When you should pick Plausible

You want to share a public dashboard with a non-technical team.
Open source matters to you and you might self-host eventually.
You want a mature product with thousands of customers de-risking your choice.
You don’t use Claude/ChatGPT/Cursor much and the MCP angle doesn’t excite you.

When you should pick us

You already have Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus open all day.
You want a no-card free tier you can actually live in.
Your project might spike (newsletter, Hacker News, viral tweet) and you need headroom past 100k.
You want to see AI crawler hits broken out, not silently filtered.
You need server-side event tracking for webhooks or backend conversions.

What’s not a real difference

Both of us:

Host in the EU (Germany, same region).
Are cookieless by default.
Don’t require a cookie banner under typical EU interpretation.

Hosting and cookie posture aren’t differentiators. Tablestakes in this market in 2026.

Switching from Plausible

You can run both in parallel. Add our snippet on top of Plausible’s (they don’t conflict), ask the same questions in both for a month. You’ll quickly see which workflow fits. You’ll also find that for some questions Plausible’s dashboard is still easier (one-click “compare to last week”, visual chart annotations), while for other questions (top referrers, bot share, custom event details) the chat flow wins.

Nothing stops you keeping Plausible on a couple of personal sites and pointing mcp-analytics at everything that ships through Claude in your workflow.

Try it

Sign up free, 100k hits/month, no card. Add your domain alongside your existing Plausible install if you want to A/B them.

Got a specific feature you rely on in Plausible and aren’t sure if we cover it? Email us. We’ll tell you straight up if we have the equivalent or if Plausible is still your better choice for that use case.

Web analytics with no dashboard. Ask Claude.

Enter your email, click the verify link, paste the tracking snippet, ask your stats in Claude or ChatGPT. Free up to 100k hits/month, no credit card.

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