Plausible alternative: a script tag that sits next to uptime checks

The pitch

Plausible is privacy-first web analytics: one small script tag, no cookies, pageviews and goals you can read at a glance, and an open source edition you can host yourself. If you want analytics alone, it is one of the good ones. This post is for the side of your site that an analytics tool does not cover: is it up, what broke, and who tells the customers. UpControl's script tag records pageviews, clicks and scroll for heatmaps, and it sits next to uptime checks, application logs and product events on the same incident page. A coding agent wires the whole thing with one npx command. The angle is one tag whose numbers answer to the site's uptime. The table and the two lists are the whole argument; the last section is the five-minute move.

Where UpControl is better

• The tag is one instrument among four, and they correlate. A traffic drop on a Tuesday opens the same incident page as the deploy that landed before it and the log lines around the failure. Plausible sees the browser side: a visit that never happened. Our check opens an incident titled with the cause, "Checkout returning 502" or "DNS error", and the page carries the context analytics cannot collect.
• Your coding agent does the wiring. Run npx upcontrol and the agent you already use (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Windsurf, Amp, Aider, Cline, opencode) adds the tag, the checks and the logging. Ask it in plain language to track signups from first visit to purchase, and the funnel is on the dashboard. No tracking code written by hand.
• Heatmaps. We record clicks, rage clicks, mouse movement and scroll depth, and draw the map over your own live page, per device: phones under 768px, tablets under 1024px, desktops above. Plausible has none of that, and if you want to see where people give up, that side of the table is ours.
• Uptime and a public status page from the first minute. Type a domain on the landing page and a status page for that host exists, with components, incidents and uptime history; the owner claims it with one click. No analytics tool answers "is it up right now" or "what do customers see while it is not".
• Privacy without giving anything up. No cookies, nothing stored on the visitor's device, a visitor is a daily-rotating hash so one person counts once a day, and typed text and page text are never read. The tag ships a public key that works only from the site addresses listed on it.

Where Plausible is better

• Analytics depth, built over years. Goals, funnels, retention, revenue tracking, custom properties, a stats API, and plugins for WordPress and every framework. Our web analytics is young: pageviews with path, referrer, UTM tags, country, device, operating system and browser, plus the heatmaps above, and that is the list.
• History that reaches back years. The hosted service keeps it for the life of the subscription, and a self-host keeps it as long as your disk does. We keep at most 31 days of web history, and heatmaps only for your plan's busiest pages. If you audit last quarter's traffic, that is Plausible's home ground.
• Session recordings exist nowhere here. Neither product has them; we also cap heatmap pages by plan. If replaying a visitor's session is the need, a tool built for that is the honest answer, and neither of us is that tool.

Switching from Plausible in five minutes

1. Open upcontrol.io and type your domain. The public status page exists from that moment.
2. Claim the page from its link to move it into your account.
3. Add an HTTP check for the site and one for the API behind it. Alerts go to Telegram, Slack, Discord or email.
4. Paste our script tag into the head of every page, the same place Plausible's sits. The two can run side by side while you compare.
5. Optional, for the "why" behind the numbers: run npx upcontrol in your repo and tell your agent what to log and which events to track.