Plausible vs Sentry
Pricing
Plausible: From $9/mo, or self-hosted free
Sentry: Free tier, Team from $26/mo
Description
Plausible: Lightweight, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative that does not need cookie consent
Sentry: Error tracking that shows you exactly what broke, for which user, and how to reproduce it
Pros
- Script is under 1KB: it does not slow your site down at all
- No cookies means no GDPR consent banner needed
- Self-host for free if you have the technical skills
- Full stack traces with user context: you see exactly what happened
- Supports every major language and framework
- Free tier covers 5,000 errors/month, which is plenty to start
Cons
- No free hosted plan: $9/month minimum
- No funnels, cohorts, or advanced analysis
- Self-hosting requires server maintenance
- Can be noisy: without tuning alert thresholds, you get bombarded
- Pricing gets complex and expensive once you need performance monitoring
- Initial setup and filtering takes time to get right
Details
Plausible gives you clean website analytics in a script that weighs less than 1KB. No cookies, no consent banners, no complex setup. It is fully GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant out of the box because it does not collect personal data.
The dashboard shows visitors, page views, referrers, and top pages, the metrics you actually check. If you need user-level tracking, funnels, or A/B testing, this is not the tool. If you want to know “is my content working?” without the guilt of tracking your visitors, Plausible is the cleanest option. Self-hosting is free if you are comfortable managing a server; the hosted service starts at $9/month.
Sentry catches errors in production before your users email you about them. When something breaks, you get a stack trace, the user’s browser/device info, the exact request that triggered it, and breadcrumbs showing what happened before the error. It is the difference between “something is broken” and “this specific API call fails for Firefox users on line 47.”
The free tier covers 5,000 errors per month. For a solo founder, that is more than enough unless something is seriously wrong. The main annoyance is noise: out of the box, Sentry will alert you about every third-party script error and browser extension conflict. Spend 30 minutes configuring filters when you set it up, and it becomes invaluable.
Verified
