Beam vs Plausible Analytics

Plausible Analytics is genuinely excellent software. It pioneered the "simple, privacy-respecting analytics" category and has earned a loyal following among developers who care about privacy. Both Beam and Plausible collect no cookies, store no PII, and require no consent banners. If you're choosing between the two on privacy grounds alone, either is a solid choice.

Where Beam stands apart is pricing. Plausible's plans start at $9/mo with no free tier — which is reasonable for established businesses, but steep for hobbyist projects, side hustles, or developers running multiple sites. Beam's free tier covers 1 site up to 50,000 pageviews per month, making it genuinely useful for smaller projects at no cost. The Pro plan at $5/mo is roughly half what Plausible charges for comparable pageview limits.

Plausible has some advantages worth acknowledging: it's open source (you can self-host), has a more mature feature set (funnels, goals, custom events), and a larger community. If you need those features, Plausible is worth its price. But if you want clean, private, cookie-free analytics without paying $9+ per month per set of sites, Beam is the more affordable path.

Already running Plausible in production? Use the dedicated Plausible migration guide for script replacement and install verification steps, then validate your pages with the stack scanner and framework setup docs like /for/nextjs or /for/wordpress.