OakData vs Plausible
Plausible counts your visitors. OakData introduces you.
Plausible is a beautifully simple pageview counter that deliberately avoids user-level data. OakData is the opposite bet: the whole picture, every person, first touch to revenue.
Plausible is one of the best products in privacy-first analytics: a tiny script, a clean one-page dashboard, EU hosting, and open source. Its defining choice is what it doesn't do. No user profiles, no session tracking across visits, no replay. That's a feature, not a gap. Plausible is built for teams whose analytics should know as little as possible about individuals.
OakData makes the opposite trade. It exists to answer person-level questions Plausible deliberately can't: which visitor came back four times before signing up, what the session that ended in a rage click looked like, which channel produced the customer paying you $11.4k. Both are first-party and cookie-free. What differs is how much they're allowed to understand.
Side by side
 OakData | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Person-level profiles | Yes | No, by design |
| Session replay | Yes | No |
| Heatmaps | Yes | No |
| Funnels | Multi-step, drill to person | Goal-based funnels |
| Identity across visits | Durable fingerprint + identify() | Resets daily by design |
| Error monitoring | Yes | No |
| Revenue tracking | Stripe MRR, ARR, LTV per person | Ecommerce revenue on goals |
| Autocapture | Yes | Pageviews + optional custom events |
| Script weight | Heavier (replay + autocapture included) | Under 1 KB |
| AI agent access (MCP) | Yes | No |
| Open source / self-host | No | Yes |
| Cookie-free | Yes | Yes |
Based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Features and pricing change, so verify anything decision-critical against Plausible's current site.
Choose OakData if…
- You need to know who: profiles, journeys, and replays, not just counts.
- You want funnels, replay, heatmaps, errors, and Stripe revenue without buying four tools.
- Returning-visitor accuracy matters. Plausible's identity resets daily by design; OakData's persists.
- You're building for AI agents as well as humans. OakData ships an MCP server.
Choose Plausible if…
- Your privacy posture requires collecting as little as possible about individuals. Plausible's whole design guarantees it.
- You want the lightest possible script on a content site where every kilobyte counts.
- Open source and the option to self-host are hard requirements.
Questions
Depth of understanding. Plausible deliberately stops at anonymous aggregate stats, which is great for simple, minimal-collection reporting. OakData tracks the full person-level picture: identity across visits, session replay, funnels you can drill into, and revenue per person.
Yes. Both are one script tag. The difference is what happens after: OakData autocaptures clicks, forms, errors, and sessions immediately, so replay, heatmaps, and funnels work without further instrumentation.
No. Like Plausible, OakData works without cookies. Identity comes from first-party signals and a hardware-derived fingerprint rather than stored identifiers.
No, and that's an intentional design choice rather than a missing feature. Plausible's identity resets every day and it doesn't build profiles. If journeys, cohorts, and per-person history matter to you, that's the gap OakData fills.
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