sonex vs Plausible Analytics

sonex and Plausible agree about almost everything: no cookies, no consent banner, no personal data, and a dashboard you can read without training. The differences that remain are revenue, which sonex includes on every plan and Plausible gates to its Business tier, and openness, where Plausible is AGPL-licensed, EU-hosted and self-hostable and sonex is none of those things.

Checked against Plausible’s own pricing and documentation on 2026-08-17, plus a direct measurement of both scripts.

At a glance

	sonex	Plausible
Cookies	None	None
Consent banner	Not needed	Not needed
Entry price	$20/mo, 200k events	$9/mo at the 10k-pageview band
Free plan	2,000 events/mo, ongoing	30-day trial, then paid
Billing unit	Events (pageviews + custom)	Pageviews + custom events
Revenue from Stripe/Polar	Native, all plans	Revenue tracking on Business tier
Funnels	Pro	Business tier
Retention cohorts	Yes	Not documented
Attribution models	Yes	Not documented
Session-level views	Yes	Not documented
Geography	Country, region, city	Country level and below
Tracker size (brotli, measured)	2,968 bytes	1,122 bytes
Open source	No	Yes, AGPLv3
Hosting	Hosted SaaS	Built and hosted in the EU; self-hostable

Where Plausible is better, and it is not close on some rows

The script. 1,122 bytes brotli against our 2,968. Plausible ships the lightest tracker of the thirteen we measured, and that is a genuine engineering achievement rather than a rounding difference.

Open source. AGPLv3, publicly auditable, self-hostable. A privacy claim you can read the source of is stronger than a privacy claim you have to trust, and we cannot match that today.

EU hosting. Built and hosted in the EU as a default rather than an option.

Entry price at low volume. $9 a month at the 10,000-pageview band against our $20. Both scale with volume, so compare at your own numbers rather than at the headline.

Track record. Plausible has been doing this publicly, and transparently, for years. That counts for something real when you are deciding who to trust with a measurement you cannot independently verify.

Where sonex is better

Revenue, on every plan. This is the substantive gap. Plausible lists revenue tracking and ecommerce revenue attribution as Business-tier features. sonex connects Stripe or Polar with a read-only key on every plan including the free one, and reads earned money from the provider’s API rather than from a tracked event — so it survives ad blockers and matches your actual deposits.

Funnels without an upgrade. Plausible gates funnels, user journeys, custom properties and the Stats API to Business. Ours are on Pro.

Reports Plausible does not document. Retention cohorts, an attribution report with selectable models, and session-level browsing. If those are on your list, they are the reason to look at us.

A free plan that does not expire. 2,000 events a month, ongoing. Small, but it never becomes a trial that ended.

Volume at the $20 mark. 200,000 events for $20 is a lot of headroom relative to what $19 buys at Plausible’s 10k band, though their price scales with volume — check both against your own traffic before believing either of us.

Privacy: honestly a tie, with an asterisk in their favour

Neither sets cookies. Neither fingerprints. Both derive visitor identity from a daily-rotating salted hash, which is the same technique for the same reason. Neither requires a consent banner, because neither writes to the visitor’s device and the ePrivacy trigger therefore never fires.

The asterisk: Plausible’s implementation is open source and ours is not. Anyone can verify their claim by reading the code. Verifying ours means trusting a description, and that is a real difference in kind, not just in marketing.

Neither of us escapes ad blockers, incidentally. EasyPrivacy carries nine rules against plausible.io and none against us, and the only reason for that asymmetry is that we are new. We published the whole audit, including that unflattering detail.

Choose Plausible if

• Open source matters to you, either on principle or because you need to audit it.
• You want EU hosting by default, or you want to self-host.
• You want the absolute lightest script available.
• You do not need revenue in your analytics, or you are on a plan where it is included.

Choose sonex if

• You want revenue beside traffic without reaching a higher tier for it.
• You want retention, attribution models or session-level browsing.
• You want a free plan that does not turn into a trial.
• You are on Polar, which Plausible does not name as an integration.

These are two tools built from the same conviction. Plausible got there first and does the pure version better; we made a different bet about what belongs in the first column.

Facts checked against Plausible’s own pricing, docs and data-policy pages on 2026-08-17. Script sizes measured the same day.