These new ones preach they are better than Google Analytics (also another evil tracking system) yet some how these ones still track you anyway and you're paying for analytics which is useless and you're punished for growing.
It might be best to save money and not use any analytics system, it's just noise at this point.
Am I missing something?
They don't set cookies. They're effectively the same level of tracking as a web server log file... except Plausible don't even collect and store IPs (unlike the server log).
That feels very different from cookie-based analytics platforms like Google Analytics.
More in their docs here: https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics
Not really oxymoron if they don't track your PII like IP address, email etc. Don't know how Plausible works, but usually these systems track page views, etc without the associated visitors' data. They either anonymize the visitor metadata or just aggregate the site data like what urls are visited, etc.
So except for self hosting it doesn't seem that this is any different to GA.
- Due to how the FISA (e.g. 702) laws in the USA are incompatible with GDPR, GA4 is illegal is much of EU (and EEA).
- Plausible actually collects less data on the visitor, making it more ethically sound.
There is tracking and tracking.
Google Analytics tracks you across the internet and collects all sorts of private and public user data and metadata, analyses behaviour, correlates with other metrics and sources of information (like ad campaigns), etc.
Plausible and co tell you there were X users with an average of 30s spent on page Z. Which Google Analytics also does, on top of the other things.
Yes, it's technically "tracking", but if you thing it has much to do with the first one you're fundamentally misunderstanding analytics and tracking and thinking in FUD terms.