Abner vs Plausible

Overview

If you're looking for a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics, both Abner and Plausible are excellent choices. They share a common philosophy: respect visitor privacy, keep things lightweight, and give you the data you need without the bloat. Both tools have earned loyal followings for good reason.

The key difference comes down to scope. Plausible is focused purely on web analytics — page views, referrers, top pages, and similar traffic metrics. Abner covers all of that, but goes further by including SaaS metrics like MRR, churn, and LTV directly in the same dashboard. If you're running a SaaS business, this distinction matters more than you might think.

Instead of switching between your analytics tool and a separate revenue dashboard, Abner lets you see the full picture in one place: which pages drive signups, how your MRR is trending, and where your churn is coming from. This post walks through the differences honestly so you can pick the right tool for your situation.

Shared Philosophy

Before diving into differences, it's worth emphasizing what Abner and Plausible have in common — because there's a lot of overlap and mutual respect here.

• No cookies. Neither tool uses cookies, which means no annoying consent banners for your visitors.
• GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant. Both are built from the ground up to respect privacy regulations without requiring extra configuration.
• Lightweight scripts. Both prioritize performance. Your site speed won't suffer from either tool.
• Clean, simple dashboards. No overwhelming interfaces with dozens of tabs. Both focus on showing the metrics that actually matter.
• Transparent data practices. Both are open about what they collect and how they process data. No personal data is harvested or sold.

Plausible is a genuinely great product. If you're reading this comparison, you're already on the right track by looking at privacy-respecting tools. The question is which one fits your specific needs better.

SaaS Metrics: The Biggest Difference

This is where the two tools diverge most significantly. Plausible is a web analytics tool — and a very good one. But if you're running a SaaS business, web analytics is only half the picture. You also need to track your revenue metrics: monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn rate, customer lifetime value (LTV), average revenue per user (ARPU), and more.

With Plausible, you'd need to add a separate tool like Baremetrics, ProfitWell, or ChartMogul to get those numbers. That means another subscription, another dashboard to check, and no easy way to correlate your traffic data with your revenue data.

Abner includes native Stripe integration for SaaS metrics right alongside your web analytics. Connect your Stripe account and you'll see MRR, churn, LTV, new subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations — all in the same dashboard where you're already looking at your traffic. No extra tools, no context-switching.

For SaaS founders and teams, this is the single biggest reason to choose Abner over Plausible. When you can see that a spike in traffic from a particular referrer also correlated with an uptick in trial starts and eventually paid conversions, you're making better decisions faster.

Core Web Vitals & Performance Monitoring

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, so monitoring them matters for SEO. Abner includes built-in Web Vitals tracking for five key metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — measures loading performance.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — measures visual stability.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — measures interactivity responsiveness.
• FCP (First Contentful Paint) — measures time to first visual content.
• TTFB (Time to First Byte) — measures server response time.

These metrics are collected from real user sessions and displayed directly in your Abner dashboard. You can see how your site performs for actual visitors — broken down by page — without needing a separate monitoring tool like SpeedCurve or running Lighthouse manually.

Plausible does not currently offer Web Vitals monitoring. If performance metrics matter to you (and for SEO they should), this is another area where Abner provides more out of the box.

Google Search Console Integration

Both Abner and Plausible offer Google Search Console integration, which lets you see your search queries, click-through rates, impressions, and average positions directly in your analytics dashboard.

Abner's Search Console integration pulls in your top queries and pages alongside your traffic and SaaS metrics, giving you a unified view of organic performance and business impact. This is a tie between the two tools — both handle it well.

Script Size & Performance Impact

Both tools take script size seriously. Plausible's script weighs in at approximately 1KB (gzipped), which is impressively small. Abner's core script is under 2KB, with the Web Vitals module lazy-loaded separately so it doesn't block initial page render.

In practice, both scripts have a negligible impact on your page load time. The difference between 1KB and 2KB is imperceptible to users and won't affect your performance scores. Abner's slightly larger size accounts for the additional Web Vitals collection code, which is a worthwhile trade-off given the data you get back.

Goals & Custom Events

Both Abner and Plausible support custom events and conversion goals, allowing you to track specific user actions beyond page views — things like button clicks, form submissions, signups, and downloads.

Abner supports two approaches to event tracking: a JavaScript API for programmatic tracking, and HTML data attributes for no-code event tracking directly in your markup. This makes it easy to track events without writing custom JavaScript — just add a data attribute to any element and Abner picks it up automatically.

Plausible also supports custom events through its JavaScript API and has its own approach to goal configuration. Both tools are capable here, though Abner's data attribute method can be more convenient for teams that prefer to keep tracking logic in their HTML.

Shared & Public Dashboards

Transparency is a value in both tools. Both Abner and Plausible support public dashboards, letting you share your analytics data openly with your audience, investors, or community.

Abner goes a step further by also supporting password-protected shared dashboards. This is useful when you want to share data with specific people — like investors, advisors, or clients — without making it fully public. You generate a shared link with a password, and only people with the credentials can access it.

Plausible's shared links also support password protection, so both tools are well-equipped here. The experience is comparable.

Pricing

Plausible starts at $9/month for 10,000 pageviews. It's affordable and straightforward pricing for a web-analytics-only tool. However, if you're a SaaS team, you also need a revenue metrics tool. Baremetrics starts at $108/month, ProfitWell was acquired by Paddle, and ChartMogul starts at $100/month for their paid plans. Those costs add up quickly.

Abner starts at $19/month for 1,000,000 pageviews — and that includes SaaS metrics, Web Vitals monitoring, Search Console integration, and everything else. No add-ons, no separate subscriptions.

For a SaaS team, choosing Abner means replacing two or three tools with one. Even though Abner's base price is higher than Plausible's entry tier, the total cost of ownership is dramatically lower when you factor in the revenue metrics tool you'd need alongside Plausible. And you get significantly more pageviews included in the base plan.

Feature Comparison

When to Choose Plausible

Plausible is an excellent choice if you're running a content site, blog, marketing site, or any project where you need clean, privacy-first web analytics and nothing more. It's simple, affordable at the entry level, and open source — which matters to many developers. If you want to self-host your analytics, Plausible supports that and Abner does not.

If you don't have a SaaS product with recurring revenue to track, and you don't need Web Vitals monitoring, Plausible gives you a focused tool that does web analytics very well. It has earned its reputation and deserves the recommendation.

When to Choose Abner

Abner is the better fit if you're building or running a SaaS product and you want a single tool that covers both your web analytics and your revenue metrics. Instead of paying for Plausible plus Baremetrics (or a similar tool), Abner gives you everything in one dashboard for less than what the combination would cost.

Choose Abner if any of these apply to you:

• You're a SaaS founder or team that processes payments through Stripe.
• You want to see MRR, churn, and LTV alongside your traffic data.
• You care about Core Web Vitals and want real-user monitoring built in.
• You want to reduce the number of tools and dashboards you manage.
• You're scaling and need generous pageview limits without steep price jumps.

Abner was built specifically for SaaS teams who were tired of stitching together three or four different tools to get a complete picture of their business. If that sounds like you, it's worth trying.

The Bottom Line

Both Abner and Plausible are privacy-first analytics tools built by people who care about doing things the right way. You won't go wrong with either one for basic web analytics.

The decision comes down to what you need. If you're running a SaaS and you want traffic analytics, revenue metrics, Web Vitals, and Search Console data in a single dashboard, Abner is built for you. If you need a focused, open-source web analytics tool for a non-SaaS project, Plausible is a great choice.

Either way, you're choosing privacy over surveillance — and that's the right call.