compare / plausible
Virling vs Plausible
Plausible is a well-loved, privacy-friendly analytics tool for traffic. Virling focuses on revenue: it reads your payments and joins each one to the visit before it.
| Virling | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | Yes, AGPLv3 | Yes, AGPLv3 (Community Edition) |
| Self-host | Yes, one Rust binary with embedded storage. No Postgres, ClickHouse or Redis. | Yes, Community Edition. Needs PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. |
| Payments | Stripe, Dodo Payments, Polar and LemonSqueezy, read with a key, no event code | No payment provider sync. Revenue comes from goals you send with a value; ecommerce revenue is a cloud feature, not in Community Edition |
| Renewals keep their first channel | Yes. Renewals keep the channel of the first payment | No |
| Revenue per visitor by channel | Yes, for every channel, referrer, campaign, page and country | Not built in |
| AI assistant traffic | Yes. AI assistant visits and AI crawler reads, with revenue | Referrals only |
Based on Plausible's public docs as of October 2026. See Plausible for their current features and pricing. Something out of date? Tell us.
When Plausible is the better fit
You mainly need clean, privacy-friendly traffic stats and do not sell online, or your team already relies on Plausible's reports.
When Virling is the better fit
You sell a product or subscription and want revenue and revenue per visitor by channel, from Stripe, Dodo Payments, Polar or LemonSqueezy, on your own server.