Umami
FreemiumA simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
Published 29 May 2026 · Last updated 27 September 2026
Scores
Popularity4/5
With over 36,000 GitHub stars and thousands of forks, Umami is consistently cited as the leading privacy-focused open-source alternative to Google Analytics. It has broad coverage across developer communities on Hacker News, Reddit, and ProductHunt, and maintains active release momentum. Adoption is particularly strong among independent developers, small SaaS products, and privacy-conscious organizations.
Learning Curve2/5
Umami's setup is among the fastest in the analytics category — a Docker Compose deployment produces a working instance in under five minutes, and Umami Cloud eliminates infrastructure concerns entirely. The dashboard is intentionally minimal, making key metrics immediately readable without training. Non-technical users occasionally need help with initial database configuration for self-hosted deployments, but the cloud option removes this friction.
Flexibility3/5
Umami covers the core web analytics surface area well and supports custom events and API access. However, it intentionally avoids complexity: there is no advanced segmentation engine, no report builder, no custom dimensions beyond event properties, and no integration marketplace. Teams needing deep behavioral analysis or complex attribution models will hit its ceiling. Open-source access allows developers to extend the codebase, partially offsetting these limitations.
Performance5/5
The 2 KB tracking script loads asynchronously and has a negligible impact on host page performance. Dashboard queries are fast on typical self-hosted hardware. A single low-cost VPS handles hundreds of thousands of monthly events without issue. The lightweight architecture is a core design principle, making it one of the most resource-efficient web analytics tools available.
Portability5/5
MIT-licensed and self-hostable on any infrastructure — VPS, Docker, Kubernetes, or serverless environments. All data is stored in a standard PostgreSQL or MySQL database owned by the operator, with no proprietary format or export restrictions. Teams can migrate between self-hosted and Umami Cloud freely. There is no vendor lock-in by design.
About Umami
Umami is a modern, open-source web analytics platform designed for organizations that want full data ownership and privacy compliance without compromising on usability. It delivers core web analytics — pageviews, sessions, bounce rates, referrers, UTM campaign attribution, funnels, and custom events — through a clean, single-page dashboard that loads quickly and requires minimal configuration.
The platform ships as a 2 KB tracking script, compared to Google Analytics' 45 KB payload, making it negligibly fast to load on any page. It collects no personally identifiable information, uses no cookies, and requires no consent banner, making it compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and similar privacy regulations by default.
Deployment follows two paths. Umami Cloud is a managed hosting service with a free tier and paid plans, requiring no infrastructure management. Self-hosting runs on Node.js with a PostgreSQL or MySQL backend and is available under the MIT license at zero cost — a single VPS instance with 1 vCPU and 1 GB of RAM can handle hundreds of thousands of monthly pageviews comfortably. Docker Compose deployment achieves a working instance in minutes.
Beyond basic web analytics, Umami includes funnel analysis, cohort tracking, session replay, and a real-time activity dashboard. Custom events allow teams to track specific interactions (button clicks, form submissions, purchases) and measure conversion goals. An API enables programmatic data access for embedding metrics in external dashboards or automating reports.
Umami is built with Next.js and React, making it approachable for developers who want to customize or extend the codebase. Self-hosted instances store all data in the team's own database, enabling complete export and migration flexibility.
Key Features
- Pageview, session, bounce rate, and referrer tracking
- Custom event tracking and conversion goal measurement
- Funnel analysis and cohort retention tracking
- Session replay with user journey visualization
- Real-time analytics dashboard
- UTM campaign and traffic source attribution
- REST API for programmatic data access
- Self-hostable with PostgreSQL or MySQL
Pros
- Exceptionally fast setup — working analytics in minutes via Docker or Umami Cloud
- Privacy-compliant by default: no cookies, no PII, no consent banners required
- Lightweight 2 KB script has near-zero impact on page performance
- Self-hosting is completely free with no event limits (MIT license)
- Full data ownership — all events stored in your own PostgreSQL/MySQL database
- Clean, minimal UI that non-technical stakeholders can read without training
Cons
- Limited advanced segmentation and behavioral filtering compared to enterprise tools
- No native heatmaps or click maps
- No built-in alerting or anomaly detection
- Self-hosting requires database management knowledge for maintenance and scaling
- Lacks e-commerce-specific features like revenue attribution and cart analytics
- Community-based support only for self-hosted instances
Umami Pricing
Freemium- · Completely free under MIT license
- · Unlimited events and websites
- · Full data ownership
- · Requires own infrastructure (Node.js + PostgreSQL/MySQL)
- · 100K events per month
- · Up to 3 websites
- · 6 months of data retention
- · 1M events per month included, extra events billed per use
- · Unlimited websites and team members
- · 5 years of data retention
- · Email support
Tech Stacks with Umami
MERN Stack
ProjectMongoDB, Express, React, Node.js: the classic JavaScript full-stack. A well-trodden path with massive community support and job-market demand.
Frontend
Programming
Databases
Hosting
Authentication
Supabase + Next.js
ProjectThe fastest way to launch a modern web app. Next.js handles the frontend and API routes; Supabase provides Postgres, auth, realtime, and storage out of the box.
Python Web (FastAPI + React)
ProjectA clean separation of concerns: React on the frontend, FastAPI serving a typed REST API, and PostgreSQL for persistent storage (MySQL, MariaDB, and serverless Postgres hosts are also available). Docker keeps environments consistent.
Tools Related to Umami
Integrates with Umami(1)
Umami's documentation includes an official one-click Railway deployment that provisions the app and a PostgreSQL database together.
Alternatives to Umami(4)
Umami and Plausible are the two leading open-source, cookie-free, privacy-first web analytics tools — both are GDPR-compliant by default, self-hostable, and positioned as direct Google Analytics replacements. Key differences: Umami is MIT-licensed with a free cloud tier; Plausible is AGPL with paid-only cloud.
Umami is a lightweight privacy-first alternative to PostHog — teams choose Umami for simplicity and zero personal-data collection, and PostHog when they need product analytics, feature flags, or A/B testing on top of web stats.
Umami is explicitly built and marketed as a lightweight, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics — same core reporting, but with no cookies, no PII collection, and full data ownership via self-hosting.
Umami suits teams that want a self-hosted, platform-independent analytics tool; Vercel Analytics is the simpler pick for projects that are already on Vercel and don't need that independence.
Vendor
Umami
Website →Tags
Details
- Maintained
- Yes
- Monitoring
- Web Analytics, Product Analytics, Metrics
- Hosting
- Cloud & Self-hosted
- Open source
- Yes
- Alerting
- No
- GitHub stars
- 39k
- Stars updated
- 2026-09-23