Credible

Simple, privacy-first web analytics. Yours, for free.

Quickstart · AI setup · Where to host · Tracking · API · Self-hosting · Privacy · Comparison · Architecture

Credible is a web analytics tool you run yourself. It answers the questions you actually have — how many people came, where from, what they read, what they did — without cookies, without fingerprinting, and without storing anything about the people who visit your site. It is a single Node.js process with zero npm dependencies and a single SQLite file for storage: no Postgres, no ClickHouse, no Redis, no container orchestration. Clone it, run one command, paste one script tag. Every feature is in the box, forever, for free.

Why Credible

Google Analytics and Plausible are the two tools most people weigh against each other. Plausible is excellent and the direct inspiration for this project — if you want a hosted, supported, commercially backed product, go pay them; it is worth it. Credible exists for a narrower case: you want to own the whole thing, on your own box, with as little machinery as possible, and you do not want a feature matrix with a price attached.

	Credible	Google Analytics 4	Plausible Cloud
Price	Free, self-hosted only	Free (you pay in data)	Paid, from $9/mo by volume; 30-day trial, no free tier
License	AGPL-3.0, all of it	Proprietary	Open core: AGPL-3.0 core, premium features proprietary
Cookies / consent banner	None required	Required in the EU	None required
Personal data stored	None	Substantial	None
Script size	4.5 KB gzipped	~50 KB+	~2.5 KB gzipped
Where the data lives	Your disk	Google's	Plausible's EU servers
Setup	One Node process + a file	Tag manager + config	Signup
Self-host stack	Nothing but Node ≥ 22.13	n/a	Postgres + ClickHouse + Docker Compose
Data sampling	Never	Above thresholds	Only on views above 10M pageviews
Funnels, revenue, custom properties	Included	Included	Business plan, from $19/mo
Stats API	Included	Yes	Business plan, 600 req/hr
Site provisioning API	Included	Yes (Admin API)	Enterprise plan
Bot filtering	User-Agent based	—	Advanced: data-centre IP ranges + network-wide detection
Data ownership	Total	None	Yours, on their infra

The honest summary. Against Google Analytics the argument is privacy, simplicity, and ownership. Against Plausible the argument is much narrower: their self-hosted edition is a Docker Compose stack with Postgres and ClickHouse behind it, which is the right call at their scale and overkill at yours, and several of its features are held back for the paid product. Credible is one process and one file you can back up with cp. What Plausible has that Credible does not is seven years of accumulated engineering, bot filtering trained across an entire network of sites, a Google Analytics importer, a Search Console integration, and a company that answers support mail. If you outgrow one machine — and we tell you exactly when — Plausible or Matomo is a good place to land. The full, footnoted comparison is in docs/COMPARISON.md.

60-second quickstart

git clone https://github.com/maixmeduret/credible.git
cd credible
node bin/credible.js serve

That is the whole install. There is no npm install step, because there is nothing to install. Credible starts on http://localhost:8000, creates ./data/credible.db, and prints a one-time link in the terminal to create the first account.

Requirement: Node.js 22.13 or newer (or 24 / 26). Storage uses the built-in node:sqlite module, which landed in 22.5 but only stopped requiring the --experimental-sqlite flag in 22.13. On 22.5–22.12, start it with node --experimental-sqlite bin/credible.js serve. Check yours with node --version.

Then add your site in the dashboard and drop this in your page's <head>:

<script defer data-domain="yourdomain.com" src="https://YOUR-INSTANCE/js/cr.js"></script>

Every option on that tag — SPA routing, path exclusions, outbound links, custom events, revenue — is documented in docs/TRACKING.md.

Numbers appear immediately. Want to see the dashboard populated before you wire up a real site? node bin/credible.js seed fills it with realistic demo traffic.

Let an AI assistant set it up

Credible is built to be driven by an agent, not just by a human clicking a dashboard. One command hosts it, creates the account, and puts the snippet in your codebase:

node bin/credible.js up --email you@example.com --domain yourdomain.com --site-path .

① Hosting        ✓ running at http://localhost:8395
② Account        ✓ yourdomain.com · dashboard http://localhost:8395/yourdomain.com
③ Snippet        ✓ next-app: inserted app/layout.tsx
④ Done           api key cred_…   ← shown once

It installs a service that survives a reboot (launchd on macOS, systemd on Linux), and picks a hosting target for you — run credible deploy --detect to see what it would choose. --target fly gives a permanent public HTTPS URL and refuses to create anything remote without --yes; --target tunnel gives a public HTTPS URL in seconds with no account at all, at the cost of an ephemeral hostname. When something is off, credible doctor names it and attaches the fix.

Under the hood it is all HTTP, so an agent can drive each step on its own. One call takes an instance from nothing to ready-to-install:

curl -X POST https://YOUR-INSTANCE/api/v1/provision \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"email":"you@example.com","domain":"yourdomain.com","timezone":"Europe/Paris"}'

It returns the account, an API key that authenticates the entire management API (sites, goals, funnels, shared links, stats), and the exact snippet to install. The same thing locally: node bin/credible.js provision --email … --domain … --json.

Then let it patch your codebase — it detects Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Vite, Hugo, Jekyll, Rails, Django, Laravel, WordPress themes and plain HTML:

node bin/credible.js install --domain yourdomain.com --url https://YOUR-INSTANCE --dry-run

For an assistant that will keep answering questions about your traffic, register the MCP server — twelve tools covering provisioning, installation, verification and every stat:

claude mcp add credible --env CREDIBLE_URL=https://YOUR-INSTANCE -- node /path/to/credible/mcp/server.js

Every instance also serves /llms.txt, a short brief with its own URLs baked in that you can hand to any model. The full runbook is in docs/AI-SETUP.md.

Features

Everything below ships in the box. There is no paid tier to unlock.

Core metrics — unique visitors, total visits, pageviews, views per visit, bounce rate, average visit duration, and a live count of visitors on the site right now.

Trends — a time series graph over any period, with comparison against the previous period or the same period last year.

Acquisition — channels, referrer sources, and full UTM campaign breakdown (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term).

Content — top pages, entry pages, and exit pages.

Geography — countries, regions, and cities, on a world map.

Technology — browsers, operating systems, and device types.

Conversions — goals with conversion rates, custom event properties, multi-step funnels, and revenue tracking per goal.

Slicing — filters on every dimension above, combinable, and reflected in the URL so a view can be bookmarked and shared.

Sharing and integration — public shared dashboards (optionally password protected), a Stats API for pulling numbers into your own tools, and an events API for server-side tracking.

Privacy

Credible is designed so that there is no personal data to leak, subpoena, or sell.

No cookies. No localStorage. No fingerprinting. No cross-site tracking. The tracker never writes to the visitor's device, which is why you do not need a consent banner.
Raw IP addresses are never written to disk. An IP is used in memory, for the length of one request, to derive a country and a hash, then discarded.
Visitors are counted with a rotating hash. The visitor ID is hash(daily_salt + site + ip + user_agent), truncated. The salt rotates every day and all salts are deleted after 48 hours, at which point the hashes are permanently unlinkable — even by you, even with the database in hand. The same person visiting on two consecutive days is two different IDs, and there is no key that could ever join them.
GDPR, CCPA and PECR compliant, with no cookie banner required.
The data is yours, on your disk, in a file you can read, export, back up, or delete.

The full explanation — including a worked example of the hash, exactly what a stored row looks like, the legal basis, and a DPA/GDPR FAQ — is in docs/PRIVACY.md.

Deployment

Credible is one process listening on one port. Anything that can run Node can host it — and the best place is usually the machine that already serves your site. Mounted under a path of your own domain, the tracker becomes first-party:

credible proxy-config --domain yourdomain.com --server nginx --mode subpath

That prints the exact proxy block (Caddy, nginx, Apache, Traefik or HAProxy) and the environment variables to give the service, so the script is served from https://yourdomain.com/stats/js/cr.js on your own certificate — no cross-origin request, and no separate hostname for a blocklist to match. Which setups can do this, and what to do when yours cannot, is in docs/WHERE-TO-HOST.md.

Docker

docker compose up -d

Fly.io

fly launch --copy-config --no-deploy
fly volumes create credible_data --size 1
fly deploy

VPS with systemd, behind Caddy or nginx — a unit file, real reverse-proxy config blocks (including the headers CREDIBLE_TRUST_PROXY needs), TLS, backups and upgrades are all in docs/SELF-HOSTING.md.

Raspberry Pi — genuinely fine. A Pi 4 with an SSD handles a few million events a month without complaint; the process idles in tens of megabytes of RAM. Install Node 22+ from NodeSource, then follow the systemd instructions.

Configuration

Everything is environment variables — there is no config file to manage.

Variable	Default	Purpose
`CREDIBLE_PORT`	`8000`	Port to listen on
`CREDIBLE_HOST`	`0.0.0.0`	Bind address
`CREDIBLE_DATA_DIR`	`./data`	Directory for the database
`CREDIBLE_DATABASE`	`$DATA_DIR/credible.db`	Explicit database path
`CREDIBLE_BASE_URL`	(guessed)	Public origin, used in snippets and shared links
`CREDIBLE_BASE_PATH`	(none)	Mount under a path, e.g. `/stats`, to serve it from your site's own domain
`CREDIBLE_TRUST_PROXY`	`false`	Honour `X-Forwarded-For` — enable behind a proxy
`CREDIBLE_SESSION_TTL`	`2592000`	Dashboard login lifetime, seconds
`CREDIBLE_SECURE_COOKIES`	`false`	Mark the session cookie `Secure` (set behind HTTPS)
`CREDIBLE_OPEN_REGISTRATION`	`true`	Allow new signups; set `false` to lock the instance
`CREDIBLE_INACTIVITY_TIMEOUT`	`1800`	Seconds of silence that end a visit
`CREDIBLE_RATE_LIMIT`	`600`	Ingest events per minute per IP (`0` disables)
`CREDIBLE_RETENTION_DAYS`	`0`	Delete events older than N days (`0` keeps forever)
`CREDIBLE_LOG_LEVEL`	`info`	`error`, `warn`, `info`, or `debug`
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_HOST`	(none)	SMTP server, for email reports. Leave unset and use ntfy or a webhook instead
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_PORT`	`587`	`465` implies TLS, `587` uses STARTTLS
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_USER`	(none)	SMTP username
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_PASS`	(none)	SMTP password or app password
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_SECURE`	(guessed from the port)	Force implicit TLS
`CREDIBLE_SMTP_FROM`	`credible@<host>`	The From address on reports

The complete list, including the tuning and geo-database settings, is in docs/SELF-HOSTING.md.

Command line

credible up                     # host it, provision, install the snippet — everything
                                #   --email … --domain … [--target …] [--site-path .]
credible deploy                 # stand up a persistent instance
                                #   [--target auto|local|tunnel|docker|fly] [--detect] [--yes]
credible doctor                 # check an instance is usable, and say what to fix
                                #   [--url …] [--domain …] [--api-key …] [--json]
credible serve                  # start the server (default command)
credible provision              # account + site + API key in one command
                                #   --email … [--domain …] [--timezone …] [--json]
credible install                # insert the snippet into a website's source tree
                                #   --domain … [--url …] [--path .] [--dry-run] [--json]
credible seed [domain]          # fill the database with demo traffic
                                #   [--days 60] [--visitors 220]
credible user:add <email>       # create a dashboard user
                                #   [--password …] [--name …] [--api-key]
credible site:add <domain>      # register a site
                                #   [--email owner@example.com] [--timezone Europe/Paris]
credible site:list              # list tracked sites
credible export <domain>        # dump a site's events as CSV to stdout  [--days 30]
credible version                # print the version
credible help                   # the same list, from the CLI

Run them as node bin/credible.js <command> from a clone, or as credible <command> if you installed it globally.

Stats API

Every number on the dashboard is available over HTTP, authenticated with a Bearer token you create in the dashboard. Point Grafana at it, drop live visitor counts into your own site, or pull a weekly summary into a script:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $CREDIBLE_API_KEY" \
  "https://YOUR-INSTANCE/api/v1/stats/aggregate?site_id=yourdomain.com&period=30d&metrics=visitors,pageviews,bounce_rate"

{
  "results": {
    "visitors":    { "value": 18342 },
    "pageviews":   { "value": 41209 },
    "bounce_rate": { "value": 58 }
  }
}

Alongside aggregate there are timeseries, breakdown, and realtime/visitors. There is also an events API (POST /api/v1/events), so you can record conversions from your backend — a completed payment, a signup confirmed by webhook — without trusting the browser to report them. Every endpoint, metric, dimension and filter operator is in docs/API.md.

Reports and alerts

Credible sends you your own numbers, on a schedule or when something happens — weekly and monthly digests, traffic spikes, traffic drops.

Three delivery channels, and two of them need no infrastructure at all:

# A push notification to your phone, via ntfy. Nothing to install or configure.
curl -X POST https://YOUR-INSTANCE/api/sites/yourdomain.com/reports \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CREDIBLE_API_KEY" -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"frequency":"weekly","channel":"ntfy","target":"my-secret-topic"}'

# Send one right now, to check it actually arrives
node bin/credible.js report --domain yourdomain.com --channel ntfy --target my-secret-topic

Channel	Needs	Good for
`ntfy`	a topic name	a phone, a home server, no accounts anywhere
`webhook`	a URL	Slack, Discord, or your own endpoint (HMAC signed)
`email`	an SMTP server (`CREDIBLE_SMTP_*`)	inboxes, and people who already run mail

The scheduler runs inside the same process — no cron, no worker, nothing else to keep alive. Creating a report on a channel that cannot deliver is refused at creation time rather than failing silently later.

Roadmap

Not built yet, in rough order of interest. Opinions welcome in the issues:

A Google Analytics 4 importer (Plausible and CSV imports already work: credible import)
RSS summary feeds
An optional columnar backend (DuckDB or ClickHouse) for instances that outgrow SQLite
More deployment recipes, and an ARM container image

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome, especially bug reports from real deployments. The rules are short: ESM only, zero dependencies, comments in English, and tests for anything with logic in it. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get set up, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for how we treat each other. Security issues go to the process in SECURITY.md, not the public tracker.

node --test              # run the test suite
node tracker/build.js    # rebuild public/js/cr.js after editing the tracker

License

Credible is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later.

In plain terms: you may use, modify and self-host it freely, including commercially. If you modify it and offer it to other people over a network, you must publish your changes under the same license. That is deliberate — it is the license Plausible chose for their core in 2020, and it keeps this project open for good rather than becoming the free tier of somebody's closed SaaS. Unlike Plausible, there is no second directory under a different license: the AGPL covers every feature Credible has, and there is nothing held back.

Credible is not affiliated with Plausible Insights OÜ, Google LLC, or any other product mentioned in this repository.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.github		.github
bin		bin
data-files		data-files
demo		demo
docs		docs
integrations		integrations
mcp		mcp
public		public
src		src
test		test
tools		tools
tracker		tracker
.dockerignore		.dockerignore
.gitignore		.gitignore
AGENTS.md		AGENTS.md
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md		CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
Dockerfile		Dockerfile
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
SECURITY.md		SECURITY.md
docker-compose.yml		docker-compose.yml
fly.toml		fly.toml
package.json		package.json

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60-second quickstart

Let an AI assistant set it up

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60-second quickstart

Let an AI assistant set it up

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