At MarsBased, we care deeply about privacy, simplicity, and using open-source tools whenever possible. That’s why we’ve recently replaced Google Analytics with Plausible as our main analytics solution across our websites.

Why We Moved Away from Google Analytics

When we started the company, we used Google Analytics by default. It’s the industry standard, but over time it became clear that it didn’t align with our values or the way we like to work.

Google Analytics is powerful, but it’s also complex and invasive from a privacy perspective. It requires the use of cookie banners and GDPR warnings, elements that we feel interrupt the user experience and can even discourage potential clients or candidates from exploring our website freely.

Why Plausible Fits Us Better

Plausible is open-source, lightweight, and built with privacy in mind. It tracks aggregated data only, not individual users. That means no cookies, no personal identifiers, and no collection of gender, interest, or behavioral information.

Despite its simplicity, it still gives us everything we need:

• Page views

• Visit duration

• Events and goals

• Traffic sources

This allows us to understand how visitors interact with our content while remaining fully GDPR-compliant.

How We Use It

We’re currently using the community edition of Plausible, self-hosted on our infrastructure. Given our current traffic levels, we don’t need the commercial version yet. The setup process was straightforward, and the official Docker Compose documentation provided a good overview of the services and environment variables available for configuration.

We’ve now deployed Plausible across:

• The MarsBased website

• Our Life on Mars podcast site

• SVGpack, our new open-source library crafted by Javier Artero

• Challenges and Lessons Learned

The only tricky part of using the Plausible community edition was connecting Plausible with Google Search Console. The integration guide on Google Cloud’s side is slightly outdated, but if you’re used to configuring OAuth applications, you’ll get it working without much trouble. The community wiki has a helpful guide: Plausible Google Integration.

The Trade-Offs

Moving away from Google Analytics does come with some limitations. If your marketing relies heavily on Google Ads, you’ll lose access to advanced remarketing features that require user-level tracking. Since Plausible’s privacy-first model avoids user identification entirely, those capabilities simply aren’t possible, and that’s a trade-off we’re comfortable with.

Outside of that, we haven’t found any major downsides. The simplicity, transparency, and respect for privacy that Plausible offers far outweigh the few marketing conveniences we’ve left behind.

In short

Adopting Plausible reflects our commitment to open-source tools, privacy, and keeping things simple. It’s one more step toward building a web that respects users while still giving us the insights we need to improve.