Plausible Analytics 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
Editorial assessmentUmami compared with Plausible Analytics
Both are open source and cookieless, but the licences differ in a way that matters: Umami is MIT, so you can modify and embed it freely, while Plausible is AGPL. Umami's self-hosted build includes funnels, retention, and journeys, whereas Plausible gates funnels and revenue behind its paid Business plan and its Community Edition drops some cloud features. Plausible is the calmer managed product with a longer track record and a bootstrapped-profitable company behind it; Umami is the better choice if you intend to self-host or want retention analysis.
Choose Plausible Analytics if
Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics.
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 | Plausible Analytics | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews) (free plan available) | $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top. | 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 | No free hosted plan; the open-source Community Edition is free to self-host. | 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 | 30 days, no credit card required | 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | Site owners, SaaS marketing teams, agencies, and publishers who want credible traffic and conversion reporting with the lightest possible privacy and compliance footprint, and who do not need user-level product analytics. | 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 | Minutes: add one script tag or the WordPress plugin and data flows immediately; goals take a few more minutes each, and a GA history import runs in the background. | 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 | Near zero for the dashboard; funnels and the Stats API are the only features that need documentation time. | 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 (cloud, EU-hosted), Self-hosted Community Edition (Docker, open source), WordPress plugin | Web app (Umami Cloud), Self-hosted via Docker, Postgres or MySQL, Deployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy/PECR, CCPA (no personal data sold or collected) | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required), CCPA |
| Founded | 2018 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Remote; legal entity Plausible Insights OU, registered in Tartu, Estonia | United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; independent, no outside investors | Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project |
Strengths and limitations
Plausible Analytics
Strengths
- Genuinely lightweight and simple: a sub-1KB script and a one-page dashboard that non-analysts read correctly on first contact.
- The cleanest privacy story in the category: cookie-free, no personal data, EU-owned hosting, Estonian entity, and open-source code backing every claim.
- Bootstrapped, profitable, and 20,000+ subscribers strong, so there is no acquisition-or-shutdown risk of the usual VC variety.
- Business-plan funnels, user journeys, and ecommerce revenue attribution push it past bare pageview counting into real marketing measurement.
Limitations
- No user-level analytics by design: no sessions per user, no retention cohorts, no replay, and funnels are aggregate only, so product analytics questions are out of scope.
- Attribution stops at the website: revenue attribution covers on-site ecommerce events, not CRM pipeline, offline conversions, or ad-platform sync.
- Daily-rotating visitor hashing means returning-visitor and multi-day journey measurement is structurally limited compared to cookie-based tools.
- Key features (funnels, revenue, API) are gated to the Business plan, making the effective entry price for marketing teams $19+ rather than $9.
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
Plausible Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Starter, Growth, Business) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume; a 30-day free trial and a custom Enterprise tier on top.
- StarterFrom $9
- GrowthFrom $14
- BusinessFrom $19
- EnterpriseCustom
For pure web analytics, Plausible's pricing is honest and low: a typical small SaaS site pays less per month than a single GA4 consultant hour, and the Business tier at $19+ undercuts most attribution-lite competitors while including funnels and revenue tracking. The catch is scaling: because price tracks pageviews, high-traffic publishers should model their real slider price before assuming Plausible stays cheap, and anyone needing user-level analysis is buying the wrong tool at any price.
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
Plausible Analytics
Best ValuePlausible is the best-reasoned product in the privacy-first analytics niche: every limitation traces back to a principled refusal to collect personal data, and what remains is a fast, honest, inexpensive dashboard that most marketing teams will actually read. The Business plan's funnels and revenue attribution cover more measurement ground than its minimalist reputation suggests, and the bootstrapped, open-source structure removes whole categories of vendor risk. Just be clear about the boundary: this is website analytics done extremely well, and nothing beyond it, so product analytics and B2B pipeline attribution belong to different tools.
Read the full Plausible Analytics 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 profilePlausible Analytics 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.