Grafana vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Grafana Overview

Grafana is an open-source visualization platform that connects to dozens of data sources to build custom dashboards. Paired with Prometheus for metrics and Loki for logs, it becomes a complete infrastructure monitoring solution. You can track server CPU utilization, memory usage, request latency, error rates, database query performance, and virtually any other metric you can think of.

For solo developers, Grafana is the professional-grade option. It is what large engineering teams use, and it scales down to solo projects surprisingly well, especially through Grafana Cloud's free tier. The challenge is the initial investment. You need to set up data collection (Prometheus exporters, Loki agents), configure the data sources in Grafana, and then build dashboards that surface the right information. This is not a 10-minute setup.

I use Grafana for monitoring my K3s cluster, and it has caught issues that would have otherwise turned into outages. Seeing a memory leak develop over hours on a real-time graph is far more actionable than getting an alert after your server crashes. But I will be honest: it took me a full weekend to get everything configured the way I wanted.

Plausible Overview

Plausible is the opposite of Grafana in almost every way. It does one thing and does it exceptionally well: website traffic analytics. You add a single, tiny script tag to your site (under 1 KB), and you get a clean dashboard showing visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, referral sources, top pages, countries, and devices. No cookies. No consent banners. No complex configuration.

I love Plausible because it respects both my time and my users' privacy. The dashboard loads in a second and tells me everything I need to know about my site's traffic. No drilling through nested reports, no deciphering attribution models, no configuring custom dimensions. Just the numbers that actually matter.

For solo developers running blogs, landing pages, documentation sites, or SaaS marketing pages, Plausible is genuinely one of the best investments you can make. At $9 per month for up to 10,000 pageviews, the pricing is fair. If you prefer to self-host, the open-source version is free and straightforward to deploy on a cheap VPS.

When to Pick Grafana

Grafana is the right choice when you need to monitor the technical health of your application and infrastructure, not just website traffic.

Pick Grafana if:

• You manage servers, containers, or Kubernetes clusters
• You need to track application performance metrics (response times, error rates, throughput)
• You want custom alerting when metrics cross thresholds
• You are already using Prometheus, InfluxDB, or similar time-series databases
• You need to monitor databases, message queues, or background workers
• You want to build custom dashboards for business metrics pulled from your database

Grafana answers: "How is my infrastructure performing right now, and are there any trends I should worry about?"

When to Pick Plausible

Plausible is the right choice when you want to understand your website traffic without complexity or privacy concerns.

Pick Plausible if:

• You want to know how many people visit your site and where they come from
• Privacy compliance matters (GDPR, CCPA, no cookie banners)
• You are tired of Google Analytics and want something simpler
• You run a blog, marketing site, or documentation site
• You want analytics that do not slow down your pages
• You value a clean, single-page dashboard over complex reporting

Plausible answers: "How is my website performing in terms of traffic, and which content resonates with visitors?"

The Verdict

These tools serve entirely different purposes and there is almost no overlap between them. Grafana monitors your infrastructure and application internals. Plausible monitors your website traffic from a visitor perspective. You would never replace one with the other.

For solo developers, the practical question is: which do you need first? If you are in the early stages of building a product and want to understand your traffic, start with Plausible. It takes 2 minutes to set up and starts delivering value immediately. If you are managing your own infrastructure and need to keep your servers healthy, invest in Grafana.

Most solo developers running a production application will eventually want both. Plausible to track your marketing and content performance, Grafana to track your infrastructure health. Together they cover the full spectrum from "are people finding my site?" to "is my server about to fall over?" The combined cost is very reasonable, with Plausible at $9 per month and Grafana self-hosted or on the free cloud tier.