BYOViral vs Plausible

The short answer

Choose Plausible if you want a mature paid product with funnels, custom properties, ecommerce revenue, EU hosting and an open-source edition you can run yourself. Choose BYOViral if you want a free plan, a person-by-person visitor log with IP addresses and sources, a public stats page with a traffic badge, and free SEO tools, and you can live without Plausible's deeper goal reporting.

They overlap less than it first seems. Plausible is built to tell you as little as possible about any one visitor. BYOViral is built to let you look at recent visitors one by one, and to let you show your traffic to other people.

What you pay at different traffic levels

Plausible charges by monthly pageviews, and each plan caps the number of sites: one on Starter, three on Growth, ten on Business. Yearly billing costs ten times the monthly price. BYOViral does not charge by traffic at all. Its three plans cost $0, $5 and $9 a month ($50 or $90 a year), and what changes between them is the size of each site's visitor log and a few extra features.

Plausible has no free hosted plan. It offers a 30-day trial with no credit card, and the trial includes Business features. Its checkout shows prices in your local currency, so the dollar figures above can differ slightly where you are. On BYOViral, the Free plan keeps the last 500 visitors per site, Premium keeps 10,000 and Ultra keeps 100,000. Daily totals for visitors, pages, sources, countries and devices are kept on every plan with no time limit, and you can add as many sites as you like. See BYOViral pricing for the full list.

What each one keeps about a visit

Plausible says it never stores raw IP addresses or full browser details. It counts unique visitors with a hash built from a daily salt, the site's domain, the IP address and the user agent, and it deletes and replaces that salt every 24 hours. It uses no cookies and no local storage. Plausible states that data is kept encrypted in Germany on servers owned by Hetzner; the company itself is incorporated in Estonia.

BYOViral also sets no cookies and uses no local storage. Its tracking script is about 650 bytes. The difference is that BYOViral keeps a visitor log on purpose. Each row holds the IP address, the network it belongs to (ISP and ASN), an approximate location from MaxMind GeoLite2, the browser, operating system, device, referrer and page. That log is what shows you who is on your site right now and helps you spot scrapers. It is capped by plan, and as new visitors arrive the oldest rows are deleted. The daily totals contain no IP addresses.

So the choice is clear-cut. If your privacy review says no IP address may ever be stored, Plausible meets that rule and BYOViral does not. If you want to inspect individual visits, BYOViral gives you that, and Plausible by design does not.

Neither product sets cookies, but that alone does not settle whether your site needs a consent banner. That depends on everything else your pages load and on the rules where your visitors live, so check with whoever handles privacy for you.

Where Plausible is ahead

• Funnels, user journeys and custom properties on the Business plan.
• Ecommerce revenue tracking and a consolidated view across sites.
• Goals and custom events on every plan, plus segments, annotations and Google Analytics import.
• Shared links and embedded dashboards from the Growth plan up.
• A Stats API on Business (600 requests an hour) and a Data Studio connector.
• The open-source Community Edition, licensed under AGPLv3, which you can host yourself without a fee.

BYOViral has goals and simple funnels on Premium and an API on Ultra, but its goal and funnel reporting is basic next to Plausible's.

What BYOViral adds

• A free plan with no card and no limit on the number of sites.
• A live list of current visitors with IP addresses, networks and sources.
• Likely-bot labeling: visits from hosting and cloud networks go to a separate small log and are left out of your totals.
• An optional public profile at /site/yourdomain.com, plus a badge for your pages that shows this month's visitors and your rank among public sites.
• 39 free SEO and web tools, from a word counter to an SSL checker.
• On Premium: uptime checks every five minutes with email alerts, traffic spike and drop alerts, CSV export and Google Search Console queries.
• On Ultra: visitor and IP labels, a daily briefing on your dashboard, and API access.

Switching, or running both for a while

1. Create a free BYOViral account and add your site.
2. Copy the one-line script from the site settings and add it next to your Plausible snippet. The two do not interfere with each other.
3. Leave both running for a week or two and compare the trends rather than the exact totals.
4. Keep whichever dashboard you actually open every day.

The numbers will not match exactly. Plausible resets its visitor hash every day, while BYOViral counts unique visitors per day with its own hash and removes traffic from hosting networks, so each tool draws the line between people and bots in a slightly different place.