LogRocket vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

LogRocket Overview

LogRocket records browser sessions so you can watch exactly what your users experience. Every click, scroll, keystroke, network request, console error, and state change gets captured and can be replayed like a video. When a user reports that "the form broke," you pull up their session and see precisely what happened, no guessing involved.

The tool also groups frontend errors and links them to the sessions where they occurred. If your React component throws an exception, LogRocket shows you the error, the component tree at the time, the Redux state (if applicable), and a link to the replay. For complex single-page applications with lots of interactive UI, this kind of visibility is invaluable.

I have used LogRocket on projects where user-reported bugs were nearly impossible to reproduce locally. Watching the session replay often revealed that the issue was device-specific, browser-specific, or triggered by an interaction sequence I never would have tested. The free tier gives you 1,000 sessions per month, which is solid for projects with moderate traffic.

Plausible Overview

Plausible does one thing perfectly: website analytics without the bloat. It is a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics that shows you visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, visit duration, referral sources, top pages, and geographic data on a single, clean dashboard. No cookies, no consent banners, no tracking scripts that slow your site down.

The Plausible script weighs under 1 KB. Compare that to Google Analytics at 45 KB or LogRocket's SDK at several hundred KB. For performance-conscious solo developers, this difference matters. Your Lighthouse scores stay high, your pages load faster, and your users never see a cookie consent popup.

What I appreciate most about Plausible is the signal-to-noise ratio. There is no data I have to ignore. Every metric on the dashboard is something I actually care about. Visitors today, top referrers, most-viewed pages, geographic breakdown. Five seconds of looking and I know how my site is doing.

Pricing starts at $9 per month for 10,000 pageviews. Self-hosting is free if you want to run the open-source version.

When to Pick LogRocket

LogRocket is the right choice when you need to understand how users interact with your application at a granular level and debug issues that emerge from those interactions.

Pick LogRocket if:

• You are building an interactive web application (SaaS, dashboards, editors, forms)
• Users report bugs you cannot reproduce
• You need to see exactly what happened before a frontend error occurred
• State management debugging matters (Redux, Vuex, Pinia, etc.)
• You want to identify UX friction points by watching real user sessions
• Your product has complex workflows where things can go wrong in subtle ways

LogRocket answers: "What exactly did the user do, and what went wrong in their session?"

When to Pick Plausible

Plausible is the right choice when you want to track website traffic and content performance without complexity or privacy compromises.

Pick Plausible if:

• You run a blog, documentation site, landing page, or content-driven site
• You want to know where your visitors come from and what they read
• Privacy compliance matters and you want to avoid cookie banners
• Page load performance is important and you want a minimal tracking script
• You are replacing Google Analytics and want something simpler
• You need basic traffic analytics, not detailed user behavior tracking

Plausible answers: "How many people visit my site, where do they come from, and which pages do they read?"

The Verdict

LogRocket and Plausible target different layers of understanding your users. LogRocket gives you the microscope: detailed, session-level recording of individual user behavior. Plausible gives you the telescope: high-level traffic patterns, trends, and content performance across all visitors.

For a solo developer, the choice depends on what you are building. If your product is an interactive web application where bugs and UX issues directly impact retention, LogRocket is the more impactful tool. If your product is content-driven and your primary concern is traffic growth and understanding which content works, Plausible gives you everything you need at a fraction of the cost.

The cost difference is significant. Plausible at $9 per month versus LogRocket at $99 per month (once you outgrow the free tier) is a 10x difference. For most solo developers, starting with Plausible is the practical move. It is cheaper, faster to set up, and delivers immediate value. Add LogRocket later when your application has enough interactive complexity and user traffic that session-level debugging becomes worth the investment.

If you are running both a content site (blog, docs) and a web application, the ideal setup is Plausible on your content pages and LogRocket on your application. Each tool goes where it adds the most value.