Google Analytics 4 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 assessedGoogle Analytics 4 compared with Umami
Umami is MIT-licensed and self-hostable, so a technical small business can get funnels, retention, and UTM reporting for the cost of a small server and never send a byte to Google. GA4 gives more depth and the ad ecosystem for free but takes ownership of your data and your consent banner. Developers pick Umami; performance marketers keep GA4.
Umami compared with Google Analytics 4
GA4 is free at unlimited volume and uniquely able to push conversions and audiences into Google Ads, at the price of a consent banner, a 14-month retention ceiling, and an interface people avoid. Umami self-hosted gives unlimited retention, no banner, and a database you own, with none of the ad integration. Keep GA4 if paid search is a real channel; otherwise Umami replaces it outright and takes the banner with it.
Choose Google Analytics 4 if
Any business that runs Google Ads and needs conversion import, audience remarketing, and data-driven attribution inside Google's own ecosystem, plus larger sites that want a free raw event export into BigQuery and have someone able to write the SQL.
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 | Google Analytics 4 | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (free plan available) | $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Free at any traffic volume for the standard product, with usage limits rather than price tiers; the enterprise tier (Analytics 360) is quote-only and sold through Google Cloud sales. | 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 full standard product with no pageview or event volume charge, subject to 500 distinct event names per property, 50 custom dimensions, 50 custom metrics, 14-month maximum event-level retention, reporting sampling, and cardinality limits. | 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 standard product is permanently free | 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | Any business that runs Google Ads and needs conversion import, audience remarketing, and data-driven attribution inside Google's own ecosystem, plus larger sites that want a free raw event export into BigQuery and have someone able to write the SQL. | 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 | Fifteen minutes for the base tag and enhanced measurement; days to weeks for a configuration you can trust, because key events, ecommerce parameters, custom dimensions, cross-domain settings, and consent mode all need deliberate work. | 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 | The steepest in this category by a wide margin. Standard reports are learnable in a session; Explore, attribution settings, and the event and parameter model genuinely take weeks, which is why a GA4 consulting industry exists. | 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, iOS and Android SDKs via Firebase, Google Tag Manager, Measurement Protocol (server-side), Looker Studio connector | Web app (Umami Cloud), Self-hosted via Docker, Postgres or MySQL, Deployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes |
| Compliance | GDPR (with consent required), CCPA, Google Consent Mode v2, Data Processing Terms and EU Standard Contractual Clauses | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required), CCPA |
| Founded | 2005 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, United States | United States |
| Ownership | Public company (Alphabet Inc., NASDAQ: GOOGL) | Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project |
Strengths and limitations
Google Analytics 4
Strengths
- Free at unlimited traffic volume, which no privacy-first competitor can match once a site passes a few hundred thousand pageviews a month.
- The only analytics tool that can import conversions into Google Ads for bidding and export behavioural audiences for remarketing, which is decisive if paid search is a real channel.
- Data-driven attribution across Google and non-Google channels, plus behavioural and conversion modelling that partially recovers consent-declined traffic.
- Free raw event export to BigQuery gives genuinely unlimited retention and unsampled analysis for teams with SQL skills.
Limitations
- The interface is genuinely hostile to non-specialists; simple questions require Explore, and Explore requires understanding scope, cardinality, and dimension compatibility.
- Requires a cookie consent banner in the EU and UK, and the traffic that declines disappears into modelled estimates rather than being measured.
- Standard properties delete event-level data after 14 months, so year-over-year analysis in Explore breaks unless you run a BigQuery pipeline.
- Sampling, thresholding, and the (other) row on high-cardinality dimensions mean numbers are directional; GA4 will not reconcile line by line with your order database.
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
Google Analytics 4
Free at any traffic volume for the standard product, with usage limits rather than price tiers; the enterprise tier (Analytics 360) is quote-only and sold through Google Cloud sales.
- Google Analytics 4 (standard)$0
- Google Analytics 360Custom
Free is an unbeatable price for what GA4 does at the ad-integration layer, and no competitor at any price can import conversions into Google Ads or run Google's data-driven attribution. Judged purely as a dashboard, though, GA4 is expensive in the currency that actually constrains a small business, which is attention: the interface, the consent banner, the 14-month retention ceiling, and the sampling all cost hours or accuracy that a $19 tool would have given back. The rational allocation for most small businesses is to keep GA4 installed for the Google Ads link and pay a small amount for something readable to look at daily.
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
Google Analytics 4
GA4 is not a good product and it is still the right default for most small businesses, which is an uncomfortable thing to write. It is free at any volume, it is the only tool that can push conversions and audiences into Google Ads, and its data-driven attribution has no free equivalent. Against that: a hostile interface, a mandatory consent banner in Europe, a 14-month retention ceiling, sampling, and an attribution model list that got shorter rather than longer. Keep it if you spend money on Google Ads, because nothing else closes that loop. If you do not, install Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch, or Umami instead and enjoy getting your afternoons back.
Read the full Google Analytics 4 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 profileGoogle Analytics 4 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.