Matomo vs Plausible 2026: A Straight Comparison

The short answer: Matomo and Plausible solve different problems despite both being open-source, self-hostable Google Analytics alternatives. Matomo is the closest thing to a full GA replacement: 30 sites and 30 team members on a Cloud plan starting at USD 26 per month, plus funnels, cohorts, heatmaps, session recording and A/B testing. Plausible is deliberately one dashboard you read in a minute, from USD 9 per month, and says no to session replay, user profiling and ad-tech on purpose. Choose Matomo for reporting depth, many sites on one bill, or experimentation. Choose Plausible if the reports you actually open are traffic, sources, pages and conversions, and everything past that is noise you would rather not maintain.

Most comparisons of these two turn into an argument about privacy, which is odd, because on that axis they broadly agree. Both are open source, both self-hostable, both let you own your data outright, and neither sells it.

The real decision is about scope. One tool is trying to replace everything Google Analytics does. The other is trying to replace the four reports you actually read. That shows up in the price, the dashboard, the migration and the ceiling you eventually hit.

Every price and feature claim below was checked against Matomo's and Plausible's own pages in August 2026, with the source next to it.

At a glance

Sources: matomo.org/pricing and plausible.io/#pricing, both read 17 August 2026.

Quick verdict

• Reporting depth: Matomo, and it is not close.
• Time from opening the dashboard to knowing something: Plausible.
• Sites and seats per dollar: Matomo.
• Predictable bills: Plausible.
• Data completeness at very high volume: Matomo.
• Paid ads and campaign measurement: Matomo.
• Running experiments: Matomo, because Plausible does not run them at all.
• Least ongoing maintenance: Plausible.

Pricing: two different meters, not just two different numbers

Matomo Cloud's Business plan starts at USD 26 per month excluding tax for 50,000 hits per month, or USD 260 per year. Extra hits cost USD 2.60 per 5,000. The traffic selector runs from 50,000 hits through 10 million, above which you contact sales. That base plan includes 30 websites, 30 team members, 100 segments, 150 goals, 30 custom dimensions and 100 custom reports (matomo.org/pricing, verified August 2026).

Plausible bills by monthly pageviews. At the 10,000 pageview tier, Starter is USD 9 per month (USD 90 per year), Growth is USD 14 per month (USD 140 per year) and Business is USD 19 per month (USD 190 per year). Starter covers one site, Growth three sites and three team members, Business ten sites and ten team members plus funnels, ecommerce revenue attribution, custom properties and the Stats API (plausible.io/#pricing, verified August 2026).

The comparison people get wrong is 50,000 against 10,000, because those are not the same unit.

Matomo's own definition of a hit is "a tracked page view, an event tracking, a download, an outlink, an onsite search or a content tracking request." Plausible meters pageviews plus custom events, a narrower definition. A content site with light event tracking will find the two roughly comparable per unit of traffic. A site instrumented heavily with events, downloads and outbound links will find Matomo's meter runs several times faster than its pageview count implies, and should size the plan on real hit volume rather than on analytics pageviews.

Winner: split, and the split is predictable. Plausible for a single site where you want a bill you can forecast from your pageview count. Matomo for anyone running a portfolio, because 30 sites and 30 seats at USD 26 is a rate Plausible does not offer at any tier below Enterprise.

Data ownership: both real, one goes further

Both tools publish their source on GitHub and both offer a free self-hosted edition, so the ownership question is about degree rather than principle.

Matomo On-Premise Community is free forever with unlimited users and unlimited hits, including all base features. Premium capabilities are sold as plugin bundles: Team at 275 EUR per month (up to 4 users, up to 5M hits per month), Business at 1,450 EUR per month (up to 20 users, up to 30M hits), and Enterprise at 3,400 EUR per month (up to 50 users, up to 100M hits) (matomo.org/pricing, verified August 2026).

That structure matters more than it first looks. Self-hosted Matomo gives you the MySQL database, so every report is a query away and nothing is locked behind an API rate limit. Matomo's own plugin documentation states you can "get access to all the raw data via MySQL for 100% data ownership" (plugins.matomo.org/AbTesting).

Plausible Community Edition is free and self-hosted under AGPLv3, but Plausible is explicit that "some features are available on Plausible Cloud only" (plausible.io/when-not-to-use-plausible). A genuine open-source release, not a demo, but not parity with the hosted product.

On location, Matomo Cloud stores data in Frankfurt and self-hosting puts it wherever your servers are; Plausible processes all visitor data on European-owned infrastructure. Both clear a procurement bar. Only Matomo lets you put the database on your own metal without losing features.

Winner: Matomo. Free forever at unlimited volume, full database access, and self-hosting that does not cost you capability.

Sampling and data completeness

Matomo's Cloud pricing table carries a flat "No data sampling" line on both plans (matomo.org/pricing).

Plausible's position is more nuanced than its marketing suggests, and to its credit the nuance is documented. Its own accuracy page states: "Plausible does not use data sampling or modeling by default. We collect and store 100% of the data regardless of how many pageviews you have." Then the caveat: "on some dashboard views that have a lot of data such as those with more than 10 million pageviews, we apply limited data sampling to help the dashboard load as fast as possible" (plausible.io/most-accurate-web-analytics).

Below 10 million monthly pageviews this is a distinction without a difference. Above it, Matomo is the one making the unqualified promise.

Retention is the sharper difference. Plausible keeps 3 years on Starter and Growth, 5 years on Business. Matomo keeps raw data 24 months and report data forever. Matomo's aggregated reports outlive Plausible's window; Plausible's raw retention outlives Matomo's.

Winner: Matomo, on the strength of an unqualified no-sampling claim and indefinite report retention.

Reporting depth: where the two products stop being comparable

This is the dimension that should decide most evaluations.

Matomo ships, on Cloud, a list that reads like a suite rather than a tool: funnels, users flow, cohorts, multi-channel conversion attribution, custom reports (100 on the base plan), form analytics, media analytics, heatmaps and session recording, roll-up reporting, crash analytics, a tag manager with 30 containers, SAML and LDAP, and white-label logo and colours (matomo.org/pricing).

Plausible ships one page: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, top pages, top sources, countries, devices, browsers, goals. On Business you add funnels and user journeys, ecommerce revenue attribution, custom properties, a Stats API capped at 600 requests per hour and a Looker Studio connector. Automatic scroll depth, file download and outbound click tracking, Search Console integration and a report on traffic from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are included across plans (plausible.io/#pricing).

Plausible's team is unusually direct about the ceiling. Their own page lists what the tool is not: not a session replay or heatmap tool, not for tracking individual users, not a full product analytics platform, not an ad-tech platform. It includes the line "Plausible can tell you that your pricing page drove 400 trial signups last month. It cannot tell you how many of those trial accounts activated a specific feature within seven days" (plausible.io/when-not-to-use-plausible).

One consequence catches people out: because Plausible stores no cross-day identifier, there is no new versus returning visitor segment. Repeat sessions are grouped within a day and unlinkable across days. That is a hard stop, not a setting.

Winner: Matomo for depth. Plausible for the speed of reaching a decision, which is underrated. SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard, quoted on Plausible's own homepage, put the tradeoff well: "Not a ton of bells and whistles, but SOOOO easy to use (for clients too) and the data is near real-time. A good solution for ~70% of websites struggling with GA4."

Paid ads and campaign measurement

If you buy traffic, this section is likely to outweigh everything above it.

Matomo's Cloud plans include Multi-Channel Conversion Attribution and Advertising Conversion Export, the latter described by Matomo as an export of attributed goal conversions for use in ad networks like Google Ads, "so you no longer need a conversion pixel" (matomo.org/pricing).

Plausible tracks UTM campaigns with automatic channel grouping for categories like Paid Search and Affiliates, and reports landing pages, conversions and locations against them. What it will not do is stated plainly on its own site: "no audience syncing, no pixel-based conversion tracking tied to ad platforms, no cross-site user identification and no support for retargeting workflows," followed by "this is not a gap we plan to fill" (plausible.io/when-not-to-use-plausible).

That is a legitimate product position, not an oversight. But it means Plausible reports on ad performance and never feeds it, while Matomo can push attributed conversions back out.

Winner: Matomo.

Experimentation: only one of them tests

Matomo's A/B Testing is a premium feature. Matomo's documentation states it is "included in our Cloud-hosted Business plan or you can purchase it on the Matomo Marketplace if you self host Matomo On-Premise" (matomo.org, A/B testing FAQ). Bought separately for on-premise it is 269 USD per year for up to 4 users with unlimited websites, with a 30-day free trial (plugins.matomo.org/AbTesting).

It is a real experimentation product, not a checkbox: unlimited experiments and variations, per-variation traffic allocation, a configurable confidence threshold, scheduling, redirect-based tests for entirely different layouts, and an HTTP API to create, start and finish experiments. Success metrics can be goal conversions, goal revenue, ecommerce orders, ecommerce order revenue, total conversions, total revenue, pageviews, bounces or visit length.

Plausible does not run experiments, and directs readers who need them to product analytics tools instead.

Winner: Matomo, uncontested.

Migration cost

Coming from Google Analytics, Matomo has a native importer with a Quick Connect setup for Cloud. Read the two pages Matomo publishes alongside it before you commit: "Unsupported GA Dimensions" and "Limitations when importing Google Analytics data" (matomo.org, import Google Analytics). The import is real, and it is not lossless. Plausible offers a Google Analytics import on every plan including Starter, plus CSV import.

Moving between the two is asymmetric. Plausible supports CSV imports and notes that "Matomo's export format will need some adjustments to match our import template." Going the other direction, Matomo is designed around ingesting GA data, not Plausible data.

One script-weight figure is worth naming, with the caveat that it comes from one vendor about the other. Plausible states its script is 2.5KB gzipped against Matomo's 22KB (plausible.io/vs-matomo). Matomo publishes no competing figure, so verify it against your own build if page weight is a hard budget.

Winner: Matomo for migrating off GA with history intact. Plausible for the shortest setup.

Matomo advantages

• Free forever self-hosted, with unlimited users and unlimited hits on the Community edition.
• 30 sites and 30 team members on the entry Cloud plan at USD 26 per month, a ratio Plausible does not match below Enterprise.
• Reporting breadth in the box: funnels, cohorts, multi-channel attribution, custom reports, form analytics, media analytics, roll-up reporting.
• Heatmaps and session recording, which Plausible will never build.
• A/B testing included on Cloud Business, with revenue-based success metrics.
• Advertising conversion export back to ad networks, plus multi-channel attribution.
• No data sampling on any Cloud plan, and report data retained forever.
• Full MySQL access when self-hosted, so no reporting question is off-limits.

Plausible advantages

• Lower entry price: USD 9 per month against USD 26.
• A dashboard a non-analyst reads in a minute, which is why client-facing agencies keep picking it.
• Far less to maintain and misconfigure. Bot filtering, scroll depth, file downloads and outbound clicks work without setup.
• Built-in data centre traffic exclusion, roughly 32,000 IP ranges by default.
• A much lighter script, 2.5KB gzipped per Plausible's own measurement.
• Shared links and embedded dashboards, useful for clients and open-metrics companies.
• A vendor that documents its own limits, which makes it easy to evaluate honestly.

Choose Matomo if you...

• Run more than three sites, or manage analytics for clients, and want them on one bill.
• Need funnels, cohorts, custom reports or multi-channel attribution without stitching a second tool in.
• Want heatmaps and session recording in the same product as your analytics.
• Buy paid traffic and need attributed conversions exported back to ad platforms.
• Want to run A/B tests without adding a separate experimentation vendor.
• Have an ops capability and want the database on infrastructure you control.
• Are migrating off Google Analytics and need the history to come with you.

Choose Plausible if you...

• Open your analytics to answer four questions: how much traffic, from where, to which pages, and did it convert.
• Want a dashboard you can hand to a client or publish openly with no training.
• Are one site or a small handful, and value a bill you can predict from your pageview count.
• Would rather not maintain an analytics configuration at all.
• Care about page weight enough that a 22KB script is a real cost.
• Do not need session replay, heatmaps, user-level profiling or retargeting, and are fine never seeing a new versus returning split.

Conclusion

Matomo is the more capable product and Plausible is the more focused one, and neither of those is a criticism.

Pick Matomo when the constraint is capability: multiple sites, deeper reports, paid acquisition to measure, experiments to run, data on your own servers. At USD 26 per month for 30 sites and 30 seats it is also the better rate past a single property, provided you model the bill on hits rather than pageviews.

Pick Plausible when the constraint is attention. Its refusal to grow is the product. If the honest audit of your usage is that you check traffic, sources, top pages and conversions, Plausible does that faster and with less to maintain.

The reader neither tool fits is the one whose next action is not reading a report at all. Disclosure: we build Humblytics, and it answers a different question than either of these, since it pairs analytics with A/B testing in one script and resolves the test verdict against Stripe revenue rather than a goal conversion, so it is worth a look only if your actual job is changing the page and proving the change made money.

Frequently asked questions

Is Matomo or Plausible cheaper?

Plausible has the lower entry price at USD 9 per month for 10,000 monthly pageviews on one site, against Matomo Cloud at USD 26 per month for 50,000 hits. Matomo becomes the cheaper option once you run several sites, because that USD 26 plan includes 30 websites and 30 team members, while Plausible's USD 19 Business plan covers 10 sites and 10 members. Both prices verified August 2026 at matomo.org/pricing and plausible.io/#pricing.

Does Matomo count traffic the same way Plausible does?

No, and this is the single most common budgeting mistake. Matomo bills hits, which its own pricing page defines as any tracked page view, event, download, outlink, onsite search or content tracking request. Plausible bills pageviews and custom events. A site with heavy event tracking consumes Matomo hits much faster than its pageview count suggests, so size a Matomo plan against your real hit volume, not your analytics pageviews.

Can Plausible run A/B tests?

No. Plausible does not include experimentation and its own documentation points readers who need it toward product analytics tools instead. Matomo does run A/B tests: the feature is included on the Cloud Business plan, or sold for self-hosted installs at 269 USD per year for up to 4 users with unlimited websites.

Do Matomo and Plausible sample data?

Matomo states "No data sampling" on every Cloud plan. Plausible collects and stores 100% of data by default but applies limited sampling on some dashboard views above 10 million pageviews, to keep the dashboard fast. Below that threshold both give you complete data.

Are both tools genuinely open source and self-hostable?

Yes. Matomo On-Premise Community is free forever with unlimited users and hits, and premium capabilities are sold as separate plugins or bundles. Plausible Community Edition is free under AGPLv3, though Plausible notes that some features are available on Plausible Cloud only. Matomo is the more complete free self-hosted product; Plausible Community Edition is a real release but not at parity with its hosted version.

Which one is better for an agency managing client sites?

Matomo, on unit economics: 30 sites and 30 team members on the entry Cloud plan, roll-up reporting, and white-label logo and colours. Plausible's counter-argument is genuine though. Its shared links and one-page layout mean clients read the report without a walkthrough.