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-- 4 min read

How to migrate from Plausible to Web-Tracking.eu

An honest guide for Plausible users considering a move. The UK hosting question, the localStorage change, and what a German-hosted, fully cookieless alternative looks like.

Why people leave Plausible

Plausible is genuinely good. It is open source, lightweight, simple, and was one of the first tools to make cookieless analytics a serious idea instead of a niche curiosity. Most people who pick Plausible are happy. So why migrate?

Two reasons come up consistently:

  • Hosting moved to the UK. Plausible's managed cloud is operated from the UK. After Brexit the UK is, in EU GDPR terms, a third country. The European Commission issued an adequacy decision for the UK in 2021, and that decision was renewed in 2025, so transfers are legal — but they are still transfers, and some legal teams in Germany, France, and the Netherlands are uncomfortable with anything that crosses an EU border at all.
  • The 2024 localStorage change. Plausible introduced a script variant that uses localStorage to compute unique visitors more accurately. localStorage is "storage on the user's terminal equipment" under ePrivacy Article 5(3), the same way a cookie is. The default Plausible script does not use it, but if you opted into the more accurate variant, you may have a compliance question to answer.

Neither of these makes Plausible "bad." It does mean that for a strict EU-only, nothing-on-device posture, there is a gap.

Honest counterpoint: Plausible is open source and self-hostable, which Web-Tracking.eu is not. If self-hosting matters to you, that's a reason to stay. Plausible's pricing on higher tiers is also competitive.

What is different about Web-Tracking.eu

Web-Tracking.eu is hosted in Germany on Hetzner only. There is no UK leg, no US leg, no fallback region. The script never writes to or reads from the user's device — no cookies, no localStorage, no fingerprinting. Unique visitors are computed server-side from a daily-rotating hash of IP, User-Agent, and a salt, exactly the architecture an EU DPA review would expect from a cookieless tool. Plus an engagement score per visit (bounce, skim, engaged, gold) that Plausible does not have.

Step-by-step migration

  1. Sign up on the free tier at web-tracking.eu. 10,000 events per month, one site. Enough to run side by side with Plausible.
  2. Add your domain. You'll get a <script> tag under 1 KB, comparable in size to Plausible's.
  3. Install the script in your <head>. If you used Plausible's WordPress plugin, the Web-Tracking.eu plugin works the same way. If you installed Plausible directly, just paste the new tag next to it.
  4. Run both for two weeks. Numbers will be similar but not identical — different bot filtering, different uniqueness windows. A 5 to 15 percent difference is normal. Anything bigger is worth investigating.
  5. Migrate goals. Plausible custom events become Web-Tracking.eu events. The API for plausible('event-name') becomes a similar one-line call. Most teams migrate four to ten events.
  6. Migrate UTM dashboards. Both tools surface UTM data the same way, so this is mostly a matter of getting used to a slightly different layout.
  7. Decide what to do with historical Plausible data. Plausible lets you export a CSV per dashboard. Keep it. Web-Tracking.eu does not import Plausible exports automatically — that's on the roadmap, not built yet.
  8. Remove the Plausible script when the new dashboard feels right. Cancel the subscription at the end of the billing month.

What you'll lose

  • Self-hosting. Plausible can run on your own server. Web-Tracking.eu is managed only.
  • A larger plugin ecosystem. Plausible has been around longer and has more third-party integrations.
  • The Plausible community. It's a friendly group on GitHub and Discord. Web-Tracking.eu's community is smaller.
  • Some niceties like outbound link tracking auto-included in the script. Web-Tracking.eu has it but you enable it explicitly.

What you'll gain

  • Hosting fully inside the EU, no UK transfer.
  • Nothing on the user's device, ever, in any script variant.
  • Engagement scoring per visit (bounce / skim / engaged / gold) that Plausible doesn't compute.
  • Built-in Google Search Console integration in the same dashboard.
  • One-click GA4 historical import — useful if you came to Plausible from GA4 originally and never finished migrating the history.
  • Free tier with 10,000 events per month, where Plausible's free trial is 30 days only.

Try the free tier

If you've been on Plausible for a while and the UK hosting question has been bothering you, run a four-week parallel test for free. Sign up at web-tracking.eu. If you decide Plausible was right for you all along, no harm done.