Plausible is good, and it's worth saying so before anything else. Simple, fast, open-source and genuinely privacy-friendly, with no cookies and no consent banner. If you're choosing between Plausible and Google Analytics, you're already on the right track.
On the two things people usually compare first, the two are level. Both are cookieless, and their scripts are 1.2 KB against 1.3 KB gzipped, which is a difference nobody will ever feel. Anyone claiming a dramatic weight advantage here is selling you something.
Cabin is built in the same spirit and goes further in three places: what it stores about your visitors, what your AI can do with it, and whether it counts the carbon. Plausible goes further in a few places too, and those are further down.
Cookieless doesn't mean identifier-free. Like most cookieless analytics, Plausible still builds a temporary per-visitor hash to tell people apart. Cabin doesn't build one at all.
To tell visitors apart, Plausible generates a daily identifier, a hash of salt + your domain + IP + user agent, and stores it to count uniques. The salt is rotated and deleted every 24 hours, and raw IP addresses aren't kept. Within a day, though, a visitor's pageviews share that hash.
No identifier, ever. Each visit increments anonymous counters for that day and domain, so two visits from the same person are never linked. Not within a day, not at all. An IP address is used in memory to derive a country, then dropped.
Plausible's method is a reasonable design and they document it plainly in their own data policy, which is more than most. The difference is that Cabin has nothing to discard at the end of the day, because nothing was derived in the first place. How Cabin counts with no identifier
Nothing. No identifier is ever created, so visits increment anonymous daily counters and two views are never linked.
A daily identifier: a hash of your domain, the visitor's IP and user agent with a salt that rotates every 24 hours, stored to count uniques.
No cookies, nothing stored on the visitor's device, so no consent banner under GDPR, ePrivacy or PECR.
Also cookieless and banner-free. The two are on equal footing here.
1,212 bytes gzipped.
1,283 bytes gzipped for the base script. A 71-byte gap, which is to say no gap at all.
An MCP server on every plan, including Free. Your agent reads reports, adds domains and verifies installs without any glue code.
A Stats API you can build against, but nothing an agent can pick up on its own.
Per-page CO₂ and energy, shown as grams and km driven. Built in on Plus and up.
No carbon or energy reporting.
Deliberately one screen. No funnels, no saved segments, no ecommerce revenue attribution.
Funnels, saved segments, user journeys and ecommerce revenue attribution. Genuinely more product than Cabin.
30 days on Free, a year on Plus, kept indefinitely on Agency.
Three years, even on the cheapest plan.
Serve the script from your own subdomain with a CNAME and SSL provisioned for you, on Plus and up.
Can be proxied through your own domain, but you set that proxy up and keep it running.
Free for 10 sites and 10,000 pageviews a month. Plus is $14 a month for a million pageviews and unlimited sites.
No free tier, and a 30-day trial. Starter is $9 a month for one site and 10,000 pageviews, with custom events counting against the same quota.
A hosted service, not open source.
AGPLv3 and self-hostable. A real advantage if you want to run it yourself.
Stored in Ireland with a backup in London. A few collection endpoints sit outside the EU to receive requests quickly, writing nothing to disk.
Falkenstein, Germany, and it never leaves the EU.
Plausible's prices, limits and script size checked against their own pages on 16 August 2026. They move, so check before you rely on them.
An MCP server on every plan, including Free, so the agent you already use can read reports, add domains and verify your install mid-conversation. Plausible has a Stats API, which is a different thing: you have to build against it first.
See MCP accessAd blockers stop both of these scripts, and that's a visitor's right. Point a CNAME at Cabin and the script serves from your own subdomain with SSL sorted for you, so there's no proxy to build and keep running.
How that worksCabin estimates the CO₂ of every page it measures and shows it as grams and km driven, which is usually enough to find the two or three heavy pages doing most of the damage.
Check your site's carbonEither way you end up with cookieless analytics and no banner, which is the decision that actually matters. Cabin's free plan runs alongside whatever you have now, so the cheapest way to choose is to look at both dashboards for a fortnight.