Coruve vs Plausible
Both are cookieless.
Only one goes deeper.
Both products refuse cookies. Coruve is the one that answers why — funnels, user journeys and retention cohorts on every plan, including the free one. Plausible is older, simpler and open source, and the rows where that matters are marked.
The short answer
Here is the case for Coruve, and beside it the reader we would send to Plausible instead. Both are on this page rather than buried in it, so you can tell inside a minute whether this is your tool.
Choose Coruve if
- You have reached the point where “how many” stopped being the question and “why” started.
- You want funnels and user journeys without buying the top tier — on Plausible both are Business-plan features.
- You want to know whether the people who arrived last week came back this week. Plausible has no retention report at all.
- You would rather the product proposed the goals and funnels worth creating than face a blank setup screen.
- You want to see the AI crawlers reading your pages, not only the visitors the assistants send.
When Plausible is the better call
- “How many visitors, from where, on what pages” is genuinely your whole question. Plausible is built to be shallow on purpose, and that is a feature.
- Long history matters more than depth. Their cheapest plan keeps three years; their top plan keeps five.
- Leaving a vendor entirely has to stay possible. Their Community Edition is open source under AGPLv3 and you can run it yourself. Coruve is hosted only.
- You want the cheapest way to start paying. Their entry plan undercuts ours.
- You want an established European company with an earned privacy reputation. They have been at this since 2018. We are newer, and a track record is the one thing that cannot be shipped.
Head to head
Plausible's prices below are the 10,000-pageview tier of each plan, from their published pricing. Read the second row before you compare the money rows — the two products do not count the same thing, and the comparison is meaningless until you have.
What a month of volume costs
- Plausible
- Starter $9, Growth $14, Business $19 — each covering 10,000 monthly pageviews, scaling up with traffic.
- Coruve
- Events a month: Free 10,000, Starter 100,000, Pro 1,000,000, Growth 5,000,000, at $0, $19, $49 and $99. Read the next row before you compare those numbers with theirs.
What counts as one unit
- Plausible
- A pageview.
- Coruve
- An event — and a click your visitor makes is an event, the same as a page view. Our own measurements (scroll depth, page-speed timings, clicks that hit nothing) are never billed, but your visitors' clicks are. Do not read 100,000 events as 100,000 pageviews: on a busy interface it can be several times fewer. Run both for a week and compare on your own traffic.
A free plan
- Plausible
- None. A 30-day trial, no card required, then you pay.
- Coruve
- Free up to 10,000 events a month, indefinitely, no card. It is the trial, and it does not end.
Funnels
- Plausible
- A Business plan feature, at $19 a month.
- Coruve
- On every plan, including the free one. Ceilings: Free 3, Starter 25, Pro 100, Growth Unlimited.
User journeys
- Plausible
- A Business plan feature, at $19 a month.
- Coruve
- On every plan, including the free one — the routes people actually take through your site, without paying for the tier above.
Retention cohorts
- Plausible
- Not offered on any plan.
- Coruve
- Whether the people who arrived last week came back this week — and the report says out loud when your window is too short to judge, rather than drawing a confident grid over a few days of data.
Goals and funnels the product proposes
- Plausible
- Not offered. Goals and funnels are yours to think of and define.
- Coruve
- Coruve mines your real traffic every few hours and suggests the goals and funnels worth creating, so you ratify a suggestion instead of guessing. Not a paid feature — it runs on every plan.
How long your data lives
Their edge- Plausible
- 3 years on Starter and Growth, 5 years on Business.
- Coruve
- Days of history: Free 30, Starter 365, Pro 730, Growth 1,095. Shorter than Plausible at every price we charge.
Saved segments and annotations
- Plausible
- Saved Segments and Annotations on Starter; the shared, team-wide versions of both arrive on Growth.
- Coruve
- Annotations on every plan — a note drawn on your Overview, Frustration and AI charts, on the day it happened. Saved segments: Free 3, Starter Unlimited, Pro Unlimited, Growth Unlimited. Building a segment is free on every tier; the ceiling is on keeping them.
Visitors sent by AI assistants
- Plausible
- An automatic AI Assistants channel grouping ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and other known assistants, sortable by conversions and connectable to goals.
- Coruve
- The same automatic grouping, named per assistant, plus a conversion-quality view of it (Starter and above). On counting AI visitors the two products are level; the difference is the next row, which they filter away and we publish.
AI crawlers fetching your pages
- Plausible
- Filtered out as bots rather than reported. Their AI channel measures human click-throughs.
- Coruve
- Reported as their own first-class screen, named per assistant, and never added to the humans — and each hit is labelled by the kind of evidence behind it. Honest caveat: only crawlers that run JavaScript can be counted this way, and most do not.
Revenue attribution
Their edge- Plausible
- Ecommerce revenue attribution on Business, at $19 a month.
- Coruve
- Revenue by channel, campaign, landing page and country, from Pro — and the payment connections are not switched on yet, so the reports are built and waiting rather than usable today.
Programmatic access
Their edge- Plausible
- Stats API at 600 requests an hour, and a Looker/Data Studio connector, on Business at $19.
- Coruve
- CSV export from every report your plan includes — the only rows without one are the reports the plan does not carry. The read API, 35 datasets, starts at Pro. No Looker Studio connector.
Running it yourself
Their edge- Plausible
- Community Edition is open source under AGPLv3 and self-hostable. Note their own page excludes the premium features from it — funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the sites API.
- Coruve
- Neither. Coruve is a hosted product only, and that is not on the roadmap.
Cookies and consent
- Plausible
- Cookieless.
- Coruve
- Cookieless. Both products clear this bar; neither of us should get credit for it.
Plausible facts checked on 29 August 2026 against Plausible's own pricing page, their funnel-analysis documentation, their user-journeys documentation, their AI-traffic page, their self-hosting page. Products change; if you find something out of date here, tell us and we will fix it.
The honest part
What Plausible does well — and the trade
Plausible is genuinely good at several things we have not tried to be good at, and a comparison that hid them would not be worth reading. Here is what choosing Coruve would cost you. If one of these is your whole question, pick them — but none of them is the reason people outgrow a counter.
- It keeps your data longer, at every price. Their cheapest plan retains three years; our longest-retaining plan keeps 1,095 days. If long history is the point, that decides it in their favour.
- It is open source and you can self-host it; Coruve is hosted only. If never being locked to a vendor is a hard requirement, that property is theirs and it is a real one.
- It is cheaper to start paying for, and its Business plan covers more sites and more team members than our entry plan does. What our tiers buy instead is funnels and journeys on the free plan.
- Revenue attribution works on their side today and does not on ours — ours is built and waiting on connections that are not switched on. Do not buy us for that today.
- It is simpler, and simplicity is a feature. If “how many visitors, from where, on what pages” is genuinely your whole question, Coruve gives you screens you will never open.
- It has been around far longer, it is an established European company, and its privacy reputation is earned. We are newer, and a track record is the one thing that cannot be shipped.
The one difference that isn’t a feature-list row
Both products count AI visitors, and count them well, so the difference here is narrow and specific — which is exactly why it is worth stating precisely rather than loudly. It is the crawlers, and what each number is allowed to claim.
On counting AI visitors, call it level.
Plausible groups ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot into an AI Assistants channel automatically, and you can sort it by conversions. If counting is all you need, this row is not the reason to switch. The next two are.
The crawlers are the actual difference.
Plausible filters known AI crawlers out as bots, so its channel measures human click-throughs. Coruve reports those crawlers as their own screen, named per assistant, never added to the humans — which is the answer to “is anything reading my site to train on or to cite it?”, a different question from “who sent me visitors?”.
We say what kind of evidence each number rests on.
Every AI hit is labelled as cryptographically verified, inferred from a referrer, or unattributed, and the three are never summed. Our own verified share is currently zero, because the public-key directory ships empty — the report says so rather than hiding it, and we would rather show a nought with a reason than a number we cannot defend.
The only comparison that counts your traffic
Run Coruve beside Plausible for a week and read both. The Free plan is the trial — one snippet, real data, no credit card.