Comparison

Ripples vs Plausible

Plausible is the best-liked privacy-first analytics tool in the category and deserves the reputation: open source, EU-owned, self-hostable, and a dashboard people genuinely enjoy reading. It is also, by design, a traffic tool. Revenue in Plausible means ecommerce revenue goals on the Business plan, there is no ad-spend side at all, and retention is not part of the product. Pick Plausible if privacy, ownership and a clean traffic dashboard are the job. Pick Ripples if you need to know whether the money you spend on acquisition comes back.

Checked August 2026 No affiliate links We are biased, and we say where

Choose Ripples if

You want ad spend and subscription revenue in the same view
You need retention split by the channel that brought each customer
You want a real free tier rather than a 30-day trial

Choose Plausible if

Privacy positioning and EU data residency are the requirement
You want to self-host, or want the code to be open
You need traffic analytics for a site that is not a subscription product

Side by side

Ripples and Plausible, row by row.

Prices are the published list prices as of August 2026. The last group is the one where Plausible may well beat us, and it is in the same table as the rest on purpose.

Feature and price comparison between Ripples and Plausible
Price
	Ripples	Plausible
Entry price	Free until $1K MRR, then $9/mo	$9/mo on the Growth plan
What the price meters	100,000 visits and actions a month	10,000 pageviews a month
Free tier	Yes, until $1K MRR	No, 30-day trial
Revenue tracking on the entry plan	Included	No, revenue goals are a Business plan feature from $19/mo
Self-hosted option	No	Yes, AGPL, free to run yourself
Google Ads spend	Included on every plan	Not available
Money and payback
Revenue from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy	Yes	No
Revenue credited to the channel that brought the customer	Yes	Ecommerce revenue goals, Business plan
Payback period, per channel	Yes	No
Google Ads spend imported	Yes	No
ROAS against real paid revenue	Yes	No
Retention
Retention curves	Yes	No
Retention split by acquisition channel	Yes	No
Traffic
Real-time traffic, referrers and campaigns	Yes	Yes
AI assistant referrals as their own channel	Yes	Shows as a referrer
Telegram Mini Apps and native apps	Yes	Script and events API
What Ripples deliberately does not do
Session replay	No	No
Heatmaps	No	No
Feature flags and A/B tests	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Self-hostable	No	Yes

Prices and features change. If you find a row here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it: a comparison page nobody can trust is worth less to us than no page at all.

The real difference

Plausible tells you a channel sent 312 people. Then it stops.

This is not a criticism of Plausible, it is Plausible working as designed. They have been consistent for years that the product is privacy-friendly web analytics, and they have resisted the pressure to bolt on everything.

The consequence for a founder is that the interesting half of the question lives somewhere else. Plausible says Reddit sent 312 visitors and Google Ads sent 289. Stripe says you made $2,847. Google Ads says you spent $1,204. Which of those two channels produced the revenue, and which produced signups who left in week three, is a question no single screen answers.

Ripples exists for that join specifically. Same script tag simplicity, but the revenue and the spend come in through their own APIs and get attributed to the first touch, so "Reddit pays back on day 13, Google Ads has not yet" is a sentence the dashboard can print.

Plausible live demo dashboard: unique visitors, total visits, pageviews, bounce rate and visit duration across the top, a visitors-over-time chart below, and side-by-side panels listing top sources and top pages. There is no revenue or ad spend column anywhere on the screen. — Plausible live demo, captured 14 August 2026. Not a mock.

Being straight with you

Pick Plausible instead if any of this is you.

We would rather you found out here than after installing.

Privacy is the positioning

Plausible is EU-owned, EU-hosted, cookieless by default and open source. If that is what you want to tell your users, they are a cleaner story than we are.

You want to self-host

Plausible is AGPL and running it yourself is free. Ripples is hosted only, and if owning the box is a hard requirement then that is a good requirement to have.

You are not selling a subscription

Most of what Ripples adds over Plausible only pays off when there is recurring revenue to attribute. Without it you are getting a traffic dashboard, and theirs is lovely.

You already have Plausible and it is fine

Switching analytics tools loses history. If nobody on your team is asking the payback question, staying put is the right call.

There is a longer list of things Ripples deliberately does not do on what we don't do.

Questions

Ripples and Plausible, asked plainly.

Does Plausible track revenue?

Plausible supports ecommerce revenue goals on the Business plan, from $19 a month. It attributes revenue you send it to a goal, but it does not connect to Stripe or another billing provider, and it has no view of subscription revenue arriving over the months after the signup.

Is there a free alternative to Plausible?

Plausible has a 30-day trial rather than a free tier. Ripples is free until your project reaches $1K MRR, with no feature gating. Umami Cloud also has a genuinely free tier at 100,000 events a month if traffic reporting is all you need.

Can I use Ripples and Plausible together?

Yes. Two script tags, no conflict. Plenty of people keep Plausible for the traffic view they are used to and add Ripples for the revenue side.

Is Ripples open source like Plausible?

No. Ripples is a hosted service and the code is not public. If open source is a requirement, Plausible and Umami are the two obvious picks in this category.

Sources

Checked August 2026. Plausible is a trademark of its owner and is not affiliated with Ripples. We take no affiliate commission from anyone on this page.