Overview

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in the United States, Cabin Analytics is a privacy-friendly, lightweight website analytics provider. Alongside Plausible and Fathom, it belongs to the privacy-first analytics camp and serves as a simple, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. Cabin collects website analytics without cookies or IP addresses, natively complying with GDPR and CCPA, so sites need no cookie-consent banner.

The Cabin dashboard is simple and intuitive, showing page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, and top pages. Its lightweight tracking script has almost no impact on website performance. Built with a Golang backend and SQLite storage, Cabin is architecturally light and can be self-hosted with one-click Docker deployment, keeping all data under your control. It suits privacy-conscious individual site owners and small businesses. Before building your analytics stack, review the website analytics setup guide.

Key Strengths

  • Privacy-first design with zero compliance burden: Cabin tracks no personally identifiable information (PII), sets no cookies, and collects no visitor IP addresses, so no cookie-consent banner is needed. It natively satisfies GDPR, CCPA, and ePrivacy, cutting compliance overhead. See the GDPR compliance checklist for details.
  • Lightweight and performance-friendly: The tracking script weighs only a few KB and loads extremely fast, with virtually no impact on page load speed or Core Web Vitals, making it ideal for SEO-focused sites. See frontend RUM performance monitoring for optimization details.
  • Open source and self-hostable with full data sovereignty: Source code is fully public and auditable, and you can host it on your own server with complete data control. Docker Compose deployment keeps operations simple, running smoothly on a 512MB RAM cloud server; see the server selection guide for sizing.
  • Minimal dashboard with near-zero learning cost: Only truly important metrics are shown—page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, visit duration, and traffic sources—with no redundant charts or complex configuration.

Product Ecosystem

Cabin Tracking Script

Cabin provides a simple JavaScript tracking snippet that integrates via a single <script> tag in the site <head> or global template. The code is tiny and supports async/defer loading, with no impact on first-paint rendering or search-engine crawling.

Cabin Dashboard

A minimal Preact-based dashboard showing page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, visit duration, and traffic sources as simple charts, giving an at-a-glance overview of site traffic without complex configuration.

Cabin API

A REST API with Bearer Token authentication lets you fetch site statistics for custom displays or internal dashboards, and sync data to other data warehouses or admin consoles.

Cabin Self-hosting

The official Docker Compose template bundles the Cabin application with SQLite persistence. Deployment involves cloning the repo, configuring environment variables (e.g., CABIN_URL, API_KEY), running a one-click start command, and optionally adding Nginx reverse proxy with a Let's Encrypt SSL certificate.

Limitations

  • Basic feature set: Lacking funnel analysis, event tracking, heatmaps, session replay, and A/B testing, it is not suited to product teams or deep analytics needs; evaluate PostHog or Matomo instead.
  • Smaller ecosystem and slower releases: Community size and third-party integrations are limited, with feature iteration lagging mature tools such as Plausible and Matomo.
  • Limited export and visualization: Fewer report export and data visualization options, with no custom reports or advanced filtering.
  • Limited cloud hosting: Official cloud services are limited, relying mainly on self-hosting and requiring basic server operations skills, so it is unsuitable for users who want to avoid server management entirely.

Use Cases

  • Personal blogs and indie publishers (★★★★★): A lightweight, privacy-friendly, zero-cost analytics solution that deploys in one click and works out of the box.
  • Privacy-sensitive small business sites （★★★★☆）: No data leaks, easy compliance, and no GDPR fine risk.
  • SEO-focused sites （★★★★☆）: The lightweight script does not hurt performance scores, balancing analytics with Core Web Vitals; see SEO performance tracking.
  • Educational and non-profit sites （★★★★☆）: Open source and free, aligning with data-protection ethics and tight budgets.
  • Teams needing deep analytics （★★☆☆☆）: Features are insufficient for professional product analytics and user behavior insight; choose PostHog or Matomo.

Pricing

Offering Pricing Notes
Self-hosted (open source) Completely free; you pay only for server deployment and operations
Cloud-hosted Check the official website; limited official cloud services

The self-hosted version runs on a low-spec cloud server, keeping long-term cost below subscription tools. Unlike paid plans from Pirsch Analytics and Simple Analytics, Cabin self-hosting has no user limits. Confirm cloud pricing on the official website.

FAQ

  • What is the difference between Cabin and Plausible? Both are privacy-friendly open-source analytics tools. Cabin uses a Golang + SQLite architecture with lighter deployment and lower resource usage, while Plausible uses Elixir + ClickHouse with more mature cloud hosting and a more active community. Choose Cabin for minimal lightweight deployment, or Plausible for mature managed hosting.

  • Does Cabin support multi-site management? Yes. Cabin manages multiple sites on one instance, each with its own tracking code and stats page, switchable from the dashboard to view data across sites. See the website analytics setup guide for building multi-site analytics.

  • Can Cabin handle high-traffic websites? The Golang + SQLite architecture suits small and mid-sized sites, running stably at tens of thousands of page views per day. At the million-PV scale, evaluate Plausible (ClickHouse-based) or Matomo, which are optimized for large data volumes.

  • Is Cabin suitable for e-commerce websites? Cabin's basic traffic metrics cover fundamental monitoring but lack e-commerce-specific conversion funnels, cart analysis, and revenue tracking. E-commerce sites should combine Matomo for more complete e-commerce analytics.

  • How do I migrate from Google Analytics to Cabin? Cabin cannot import GA historical data directly, but you can run both tracking codes in parallel until Cabin accumulates enough data, then switch gradually. The migration workflow is covered in the website analytics setup guide.