fivebar vs Plausible

Plausible is the tool most like fivebar. fivebar also times your pages, shows the bots it left out, finds the pages that fail by itself, and answers apps over MCP, for less at every size Plausible prices.

Both count without cookies, from one small script, and keep their data in the EU. Both have an AI Assistants channel, scroll depth, time on page, email reports and public dashboards. So this page is about the rest.

How fast your pages load

Plausible doesn’t time your pages: none of its metrics, from visitors to scroll depth, is a load time. fivebar’s tag also times every page load in your visitors’ own browsers, on their own phones and connections. The Speed page rates each measure by Google’s thresholds, the Core Web Vitals among them, by device, browser and country, and lists the pages with the most slow loads first.

The bots it left out

Both keep bots out of your figures. Plausible drops them without showing you how many it dropped from your site, and its docs warn that people on some VPNs and on iCloud Private Relay are dropped with them. fivebar drops those too, as most VPNs run on servers, but it counts everything it left out on a Bots page: how many pageviews, which pages, from which networks, and why each one was taken for a bot. When a visit of your own goes missing, that’s where to look.

Pages that fail

To count 404s in Plausible, you add a script to your 404 page and set up a goal, and each one counts toward your bill. Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so its Errors page fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from, which is how a broken link shows up. Safari needs one attribute on your error pages’ template. Error pages are never billed.

Asking an app

fivebar has an MCP server: add https://fiveb.ar/api/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any app that takes one, sign in and choose Allow. The app reads your stats with fivebar’s rules about what they mean, and if you tick a box, adds goals and changes settings when you ask. It comes with every plan.

Plausible hasn’t released one of its own yet, though its code shows one on the way. Its docs point to a community server Sentry built, which reads your stats through Plausible’s Stats API with your API key. The Stats API comes with Plausible’s Business plan.

Prices

Both charge by the pageviews and events counted a month, and both sell a year for the price of ten months. Plausible’s cheapest plan, Starter, is for one site, with nobody to share it with, no custom properties and no Stats API. fivebar has one plan with everything in it, for up to 1,024 sites. Plausible bills the 404s it counts; fivebar never bills an error page, nor a bot.

A month, in US dollars, from fivebar’s prices and Plausible’s. Plausible’s Growth plan, for up to 3 sites, is between the two. Business is what has custom properties, funnels, revenue and the Stats API, and holds up to 10 sites.

What Plausible has that fivebar doesn’t

• Funnels and revenue, on Business: funnels of the steps to a goal, and revenue beside every source and page.
• An importer, from Google Analytics 4, and from other tools by CSV files in its own format. fivebar can’t bring your history over yet.
• User journeys, the paths visits took to and from a page, on Business.
• Search Console: the searches that brought people from Google, in the dashboard.
• Self-hosting: its Community Edition is open source, to run on your own server.

Switching

Add fivebar’s tag beside Plausible’s, and run both for a few weeks, so you have both counts for the same days before you take Plausible’s out. Where your pages call plausible() to send an event, call tally() with the same name, and its props as the data. Your goals are added again in fivebar, in a site’s settings or by asking a connected app.

Checked on 19 October 2026, on Plausible’s own pages, each linked where it’s used.