Plausible Analytics vs Umami Analytics - An Experiment
As 'The Clash' might have said - should I pay or should I self-host.
I have been running an experiment between Plausible Analytics and Umami Analytics for the last three months, to see if there is a difference how they handle bot traffic.
Why is it important? Well if I have a post which gets good traffic, I know to develop it. I can see how the writing actually lands. Imaginary visits mean nothing.
Google Analytics wasn't really doing it for me. It's hard to read the data because of how bot visits to the site skew it. It uses cookies to track people across the internet. And I wanted something which respected the privacy of readers.
I really like using Plausible, but it's an expense. The Umami hobby tier is free, thus the comparison.
Plausible has good bot filtering - would Umami be close?
No, it wouldn't.
Around 35% of the logged visits on Umami were fake. 80% of logged homepage visits on Umami were from bots.
What about Self-hosting Plausible Analytics?
I thought self-hosting Plausible Analytics would save costs.
It would save some - Hetzner (a company based in Germany) would be about a 50% saving. This is comparing paying Plausible monthly rather than yearly. Ionos, a UK based company, would save even more. These are not paid links - they are just company homepages.
There are a couple of factors. Would self-hosting on your own server be worth the extra work? Or could it be a good learning experience?
But again… it all comes back to the bots. if you self-host Plausible Analytics, you don't get the full bot protection.
You could look at adding Cloudflare into the mix, but with Ghost Pro - you can't.
Honestly, it's turtles all the way down.
So if you want clean analytics on Ghost Pro, paid Plausible Analytics seems to be the best way.
If you have a site which goes through Cloudflare, if you are happy that the data may be skewed, want to learn about VPS/docker/caddy, and save a little money (but spend more time), you can look at the self- host route.
Tere are two posts on the tech side of blogging (made simple) and getting started - The Joy of Blogging and A Guide to Bilingual Blogging.