Plausible Analytics is a cookieless, open-source web analytics tool operated by Plausible Insights OÜ, a small company incorporated in Tartu, Estonia and described as funded entirely by its subscribers. Its own data policy states the tool does not use cookies, does not generate persistent identifiers, and does not track visitors across devices, websites or apps; it lists a fixed, minimal set of data points collected (page URL, HTTP referrer, browser/OS/device type derived from User-Agent, and country/region/city derived from IP address, with the IP address itself never stored) and describes a same-day hashing scheme (daily salt rotated and deleted every 24 hours) used to count unique visitors without persistent tracking. The policy states Plausible does not sell data, shares it only with infrastructure-level service providers, and never uses it for advertising or profiling; the source code is published on GitHub under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3). Plausible commissioned and published an independent legal assessment of its GDPR/ePrivacy compliance written by a named external data-protection lawyer (Steffen Gross of Simpliant Legal PartG mbB); no breach, regulator action, or bug-bounty program was found in this research.
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Plausible's data policy publishes a complete, fixed list of the only data points it collects and stores per pageview — Page URL (query parameters discarded except campaign params), HTTP Referer, Browser and Operating System (derived from User-Agent, full User-Agent discarded), Device type, and Country/region/city (derived from IP address, with the IP address itself not stored) — and states this is done without collecting personal data that could identify individuals.
Plausible's privacy policy names the data controller as Plausible Insights OÜ, based in Tartu, Estonia, with a named privacy contact email, and states website-visitor data is processed entirely within the European Union.
Plausible Analytics' source code repository on GitHub publishes its license as the GNU Affero General Public License, Version 3 — a copyleft license that requires anyone who runs a modified version of the software as a network service to make their source code available to users of that service.
Plausible's hosted (non-self-hosted) SaaS is not run purely by Plausible: visitor data is processed and stored on infrastructure owned and operated by three named third-party providers — Hetzner (Germany, primary servers in Falkenstein), UpCloud (Finland, database hosting and data-export storage), and Bunny (Slovenia, CDN) — so a site owner using Plausible's hosted cloud (rather than self-hosting the open-source software) is trusting visitor data to these named external infrastructure vendors, all EU-based, in addition to Plausible itself.
Plausible's data policy states that website operators retain full ownership and control of their website data, that Plausible does not sell data and only shares it with trusted service providers where necessary to operate the service, and that visitor data is not used for advertising, profiling or monetization.
Plausible published, on its own blog, a legal assessment of Google Analytics 4 and Plausible Analytics under the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, written by Steffen Gross, described as a data protection expert and lawyer at Simpliant Legal PartG mbB and external data protection officer at Simpliant GmbH, who concludes Plausible's pseudonymization-then-anonymization design can rely on legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) without requiring cookie-banner consent, and that Plausible falls outside Art. 5(3) ePrivacy Directive consent requirements because it stores no information on the user's device.
Plausible's data policy states it does not track people across their devices or across websites and apps, does not use cookies, browser cache or local storage, and does not generate persistent identifiers; instead it computes a daily hash of (daily salt + website domain + IP address + user agent) to count unique visitors, with the salt rotated and deleted every 24 hours and raw IP/User-Agent data never stored, which the policy states prevents tracking users across days.