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12 Comments

Plausible is now fully open source

One of the main reasons I started Plausible was to provide a more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. I believe that people should be able to control and know about their data, instead of having it sold to the advertisers behind their back.

Today I’m happy to announce that Plausible is open source with the code being available on Github. This repository includes all of the code powering plausible.io with nothing hidden.

Read the full announcement here: https://plausible.io/blog/plausible-is-going-open-source

Github repository: https://github.com/plausible-insights/plausible

  1. 2

    Thanks for sharing the source code, I always love to check out how people are approaching the typical issues when you're building a SaaS product.
    I see you're using Elixir and every day I'm seeing more people using it, I think I should give it a try, anyway I'm all-in on TypeScript at this moment.
    BTW I think @alchemist would like to check out the src code too, he's the Elixir guy :)

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      I think it's amazing to see Plausible open sourced and I just checked out the repo.

      It came as a huge surprise to see Amplitude powers the app from behind the scenes!

      Almanac, @Carter's event analytics app, will be an interesting point of comparison if he ever goes the same route and open sources. On his podcast, he did say that might one day happen!

  2. 2

    This looks great. I was looking at plausible recently and wondering if I should try it instead of GA, it looks a million times nicer. I love the transparent site traffic stats as a demo:

    https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=month&date=2019-08-01

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      I think you should give it a go! ;) Anything holding you back from switching?

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        I should :) What's holding me back is mostly inertia, GA is free and mostly good enough, so no compelling reasons.

        I just started a new project so could use it for that potentially. I'd have trouble recommending this to larger businesses I work with over GA as they tend to want quite complex breakdowns. Will email you with thoughts about it though.

        1. 1

          Gotcha :)

          I would definitely be curious to get your thoughts on more complex breakdowns. I'm interested in figuring out how Plausible could be as powerful as GA without the cruft and complexity.

  3. 1

    Well done. I really looking into this, because your values on this project and more important how to do you communicate about this is really important and crucial, not only for your project alone, but for a better internet.

    Do you plan to add also a contributors guide ? Opensource is not only about transparency, but you can collect ideas. I think, if you haven't already planned, using some kind of "plugin system", you can attract developers/quality contributions and spread your work

    1. 2

      Sure, why not!

      I didn't think this would gather so much interest so I didn't include a contributors guide but I'm happy to do it!

  4. 1

    This space is really interesting — for Bento, we have an analytics platform too and realising over and over that you can't really "replace" GA.

    You have to provide unique answers that it never can or won't (i.e GA was originally built for publishers, not SAAS or eCommerce). When you have a handful of answers, selling becomes so much easier.

  5. 1

    That's awesome and bold move.

    Although it seems counter intuitive, I've found a lot of companies doing something similar where they let the product to be used for free / open source. Then it acquires users who can advocate for its adoption company wide.

    Best of luck

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 2

      It includes all the code behind Plausible, including all the SaaS stuff. However, I don't think it's easy for you to copy the code to start your own Saas. The code in this repo is very much custom to Plausible.

  7. 3

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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