Plausible is great for content sites (simple pageview analytics). Happenstance is built for products (user behavior, funnels, errors).
| Feature | Happenstance | Plausible |
|---|---|---|
| Target Audience | Product teams | Content sites |
| Privacy-Focused | GDPR-first | Cookie-free |
| Pageview Tracking | Primary focus | |
| Event Tracking | Auto-tracked | Manual goals |
| Funnel Analytics | ||
| Retention Cohorts | ||
| Error Tracking | Built-in | |
| Setup Complexity | < 60 seconds | ~5 minutes |
| Script Size | ~3KB | < 1KB |
| Code Changes Required | None | Script embed |
• Blogs and content websites
• Marketing landing pages
• Portfolio sites
• Simple traffic monitoring
• Cookie-free compliance
Focus: How many people visit? Where from? What pages?
• SaaS applications
• Web products with user flows
• Conversion funnels & onboarding
• Feature adoption tracking
• Error correlation with user behavior
Focus: How do users behave? What features work? Where do they drop off?
Both respect privacy. Plausible for traffic. Happenstance for product insights.
✓ You're building a product (SaaS, web app), not a content site
✓ You need user behavior insights, not just pageview counts
✓ You want funnels, retention, cohorts—actual product metrics
✓ You want errors + analytics together (see what breaks your flows)
✓ You don't want to instrument events manually
✓ You want AI to discover events—no manual tagging
✓ You need to understand why users drop off, not just that they visited
✓ You have a content site or blog
✓ You only need pageview analytics
✓ You want the lightest possible script
✓ You want cookie-free analytics
✓ You don't need product features (funnels, etc)
✓ You're replacing Google Analytics
✓ You want the simplest possible tool
Product analytics
Web analytics