Counter vs Umami
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedCounter compared with Umami
Umami is the same open-source instinct taken seriously: MIT-licensed, self-hostable on Docker and Postgres, with funnels, retention, journeys, revenue, and a full API in the free build, plus a hosted free tier. Counter is smaller and simpler but ends where Umami begins. Any technical user considering self-hosting Counter should look at Umami first, because the deployment is barely harder and the product is a different league.
Umami compared with Counter
Counter is a pay-what-you-want AGPL project from a single developer with a roughly one-kilobyte script and deliberately almost no features. Umami is the same philosophical family with a real feature set, a company behind it, and a permissive licence. Counter suits a personal site where the goal is a visitor count; Umami suits anything where a business decision follows from the number.
Choose Counter if
Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription.
Choose Umami if
Technical teams and developer-led small businesses who want to own their analytics database outright, agencies running many sites on one self-hosted instance, and anyone who wants funnels, retention, and journeys without cookies, a consent banner, or a per-site subscription.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Counter | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (pay what you want) (free plan available) | $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost. | Open-source software free to self-host under MIT, plus a managed Cloud service with a free tier, a usage-metered Pro plan billed on monthly events, and a quote-only Enterprise plan. |
| Free plan | The entire product is free to use with no feature gating; users are asked to contribute a voluntary service fee when they are able. | Cloud Hobby is free with roughly 100,000 events per month across up to three websites and six months of data retention; self-hosting is free forever with no limits at all. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the service is free to use indefinitely | 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | Personal sites, blogs, side projects, and open-source project pages where the only question is how many people visited and where they came from, and where the owner would rather support an independent developer than pay a subscription. | Technical teams and developer-led small businesses who want to own their analytics database outright, agencies running many sites on one self-hosted instance, and anyone who wants funnels, retention, and journeys without cookies, a consent banner, or a per-site subscription. |
| Setup time | Under five minutes. Create an account, paste a one-kilobyte script, and the numbers start appearing. There is nothing else to configure. | Five minutes on Cloud: sign up, paste the script, done. An hour or two for a first self-hosted deployment, most of it spent on the database and a reverse proxy rather than on Umami itself. |
| Learning curve | None. The dashboard has four sections and no report builder, which is the entire design intent. | Low for the dashboard, which is deliberately readable, and moderate for events, funnels, and the API. The real curve is operational rather than analytical if you self-host. |
| Platforms | Web app (German-hosted), Self-hosted (Go binary plus Redis), JavaScript tracking script | Web app (Umami Cloud), Self-hosted via Docker, Postgres or MySQL, Deployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required) | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required), CCPA |
| Founded | 2020 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Germany | United States |
| Ownership | Independent single-developer project, funded by voluntary user payments | Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project |
Strengths and limitations
Counter
Strengths
- The most conservative privacy architecture in this category: no cookies, no browser storage, no fingerprinting, and no IP processing in the backend at all.
- A tracking script of roughly one kilobyte, which is among the smallest in existence and effectively free in page weight terms.
- No consent banner required, with less to explain to a data protection officer than any competitor because there is less data being handled.
- AGPL-licensed and self-hostable from a Go binary plus Redis, so the software survives whatever happens to the hosted service.
Limitations
- The hosted service is run by one developer with no SLA and no support commitment, and the domain has already lapsed once, in 2025, which is a real continuity risk.
- No events, goals, funnels, or conversion reporting at all, so it cannot answer whether a campaign produced signups.
- No meaningful API, warehouse export, or BI connectors, so the data cannot feed anything else you run.
- No teams, roles, white labelling, or client dashboards, which rules it out for agency use entirely.
Umami
Strengths
- The MIT licence is the most permissive in the category, allowing modification, embedding, and commercial use with no copyleft obligation, which AGPL alternatives do not.
- Self-hosting is genuinely capable rather than crippled: funnels, retention, journeys, goals, revenue, and the full API are all in the open-source build.
- Retention analysis and user journeys are unusual in privacy-first web analytics and push Umami toward lightweight product analytics without the cookies.
- A sub-2KB script with no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no personal data, so no analytics consent banner is required and Core Web Vitals are unaffected.
Limitations
- Cloud pricing meters events rather than pageviews, so heavily instrumented sites exhaust allowances much faster than their traffic implies.
- Self-hosting is only free if you already have the skills; Docker deployment, database backups, and version upgrades are real ongoing work for a non-technical team.
- The company has raised a single $1.5M pre-seed and is small, so the hosted service and support carry more vendor risk than a bootstrapped-profitable competitor.
- No Google Ads conversion import, remarketing audiences, or ad-platform connectors at all, so paid search teams keep GA4 alongside it.
Pricing compared
Counter
Pay what you want: the service is free to use and asks for a voluntary, affordable service fee, with no tiers, feature gates, or trials; the AGPL source can also be self-hosted at your own infrastructure cost.
- Hosted (pay what you want)$0
- Self-hosted$0
At a price of zero with an honest request attached, the value question is not really about money, it is about risk and scope. What you get is a fast, tiny, genuinely private visitor counter that answers two questions well and asks nothing of you. What you do not get is events, goals, funnels, an API, teams, or any commitment that the service will exist next year. For a personal site that is an excellent trade and the right thing to do is pay something. For a business, the six to twenty dollars a month that Pirsch, Simple Analytics, Plausible, or Fathom charge buys continuity, support, and a feature set that grows with you, and that is money well spent rather than money saved.
Umami
Open-source software free to self-host under MIT, plus a managed Cloud service with a free tier, a usage-metered Pro plan billed on monthly events, and a quote-only Enterprise plan.
- Self-hosted$0
- Cloud Hobby$0
- Cloud Pro$20
- Cloud EnterpriseCustom
Self-hosted Umami is the best capability-per-dollar anywhere in this category, and it is not close: funnels, retention, user journeys, revenue, attribution, and a full API for the price of a VPS, with the raw database in your own hands. That value is only real if someone on the team is comfortable with Docker and Postgres, and if not, you are buying operational risk rather than saving money. Cloud is priced sensibly but less remarkably: $20 for a million events is competitive rather than category-leading, and the event meter means an instrumented site hits the ceiling sooner than a pageview-priced competitor would. Buy the self-hosted version if you have an engineer, and treat Cloud as convenience pricing rather than the reason to choose Umami.
Editorial verdict on each
Counter
Counter is the most likeable product in this category and the one you should be most careful about depending on. The privacy engineering is genuinely the strictest here, refusing even to process IP addresses in the backend, the script is a kilobyte, no consent banner is needed, and the whole thing is free with a polite request attached. For a personal blog, an open-source docs site, or a portfolio, it is the right tool and you should pay the developer something. For anything commercial, the absence of events, goals, an API, teams, and any service commitment is disqualifying, and the fact that the domain lapsed once in 2025 is not a detail to gloss over. If you like the philosophy but need reliability, Simple Analytics is free and more capable, Pirsch is six dollars and far deeper, and Umami is the open-source version to self-host instead.
Read the full Counter profileUmami
Umami is the right answer for any small business with an engineer and an opinion about data ownership. Self-hosted, it gives you funnels, retention, user journeys, revenue, and a full API for the price of a VPS, with every raw event in a database you can query and keep forever, and the MIT licence means you can build on it without legal homework. That is the best capability-per-dollar in this entire category, and it is contingent on someone being willing to run Docker and a Postgres backup schedule. If nobody is, Cloud's free tier is a fine place to start and the $20 Pro plan is competitive rather than remarkable, and a fully managed competitor like Pirsch or Simple Analytics may serve you better. Either way, the consent banner goes away, Google gets nothing, and if you spend on Google Ads you keep GA4 running underneath regardless.
Read the full Umami profileCounter profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Umami last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.