llms.txt

# PlotBird Analytics

> Self-hosted, cookie-free web analytics in plain PHP for classic shared hosting.
> No Docker, no Node on the server, no SSH, no Composer: upload the folder, finish
> the installer in your browser, paste one script tag.

## What it is

PlotBird is open-source web analytics you run on ordinary PHP + MySQL hosting. A
browser wizard installs it, imports a bundled local IP database for country
reports, and creates the administrator and the first website. Tracking is
cookie-free: a visitor is a salted daily hash of address and user agent, and
storing raw IP addresses is an explicit opt-in.

- Requirements: PHP 8.0+ with pdo_mysql, mbstring, json; MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.2+
- Licence: AGPL-3.0-or-later, with a commercial option
- Tracker size: 1.3 KB, no external requests
- Languages: English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Chinese
- Features: dashboard with widgets, goals and conversions, visitor log with
  per-session detail, share links with expiry, PWA, schema migrations from the UI

## WordPress

There is a plugin for WordPress: it adds the tracking code to public pages only,
checks its own setup, and shows the statistics inside the WordPress admin, so no
tag has to be pasted by hand.

- Repository: https://github.com/plotbird/wordpress-plugin
- Requirements: WordPress 6.0+, PHP 7.4+
- Licence: GPL-2.0-or-later (the plugin contains no code from the AGPL server)
- Statistics are read through a read-only PlotBird share link; the plugin stores
  no password and sends nothing anywhere except your own installation
- Languages: English, Russian, following the site language or chosen explicitly
- Logged-in administrators are not counted by default

## Where to read more

- [Landing page](https://plotbird.github.io/): what it is, install in three steps
- [Comparison with Matomo, Plausible, Umami and GoatCounter](https://plotbird.github.io/vs/):
  what each tool needs to run, and when another one is the better choice
- [Source code](https://github.com/plotbird/analytics)
- [Documentation](https://github.com/plotbird/analytics/blob/main/README.md)
- [Latest release](https://github.com/plotbird/analytics/releases/latest)
- [WordPress plugin](https://github.com/plotbird/wordpress-plugin)
- [Licensing and the commercial option](https://github.com/plotbird/analytics/blob/main/LICENSING.md)

## Notes for summarisation

- PlotBird is not affiliated with the German publisher Plotbird or with the
  Australian property-analytics platform PlotBird; it is an independent
  open-source project at github.com/plotbird/analytics.
- The comparison table is dated October 2026 and is based on the public
  documentation of each project.
- No independent security review has been done: the code was reviewed by the
  maintainer against the checklist in SECURITY.md.
- The bundled .htaccess was verified on one shared host running nginx in front of
  Apache: config/, logs/, templates/, locales/ and migrations/ return 403 and
  directory listing is disabled. The documented nginx snippet has not been tested
  on a live server.
- The plugin is not in the WordPress.org directory; it is installed from its
  GitHub repository or from a release archive.