PostHog 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.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in GTM Analytics for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentUmami compared with PostHog
PostHog is the maximal version of this idea: product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and web analytics in one platform with a large free tier, at the cost of complexity and a cookie-setting architecture that usually needs a banner. Umami is a fraction of the surface area, cookieless, and self-hostable on a small VPS. Take PostHog if you are measuring a product; take Umami if you are measuring a website and want the consent banner gone.
Choose PostHog if
Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it.
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 | PostHog | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance) | $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro) |
| Pricing model | Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features. | 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 | 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1M data warehouse rows per month, on 1 project with 1-year retention. | Cloud Hobby is free with 100,000 events per month on one website and six months of data retention; self-hosting is free forever with no limits at all. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial | 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it. | 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 to first data with the JS snippet and autocapture; days to weeks to define clean custom events, dashboards, and cohorts; warehouse sources and pipelines are a separate project. | 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 | Low for the web analytics dashboard; moderate for funnels, cohorts, and replay; high for SQL insights, warehouse modeling, and experimentation statistics. | 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, JavaScript snippet and web SDK, Server SDKs (Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, and others), Mobile SDKs (iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter), Self-hosted Hobby build (Docker, open source) | Web app (Umami Cloud), Self-hosted via Docker, PostgreSQL, Deployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA on Boost, Scale, or Enterprise package) | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required), CCPA, DPA publicly available, No SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification (vendor security page) |
| Founded | 2020 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Remote-first; US-incorporated (San Francisco), team distributed globally | United States |
| Ownership | Venture-backed | Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project |
Strengths and limitations
PostHog
Strengths
- Breadth with real integration: analytics, replay, flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, and a warehouse genuinely share one event stream and identity graph rather than being bolted-on acquisitions.
- The most generous free tier in the category, 1M events and 5K recordings monthly, permanently, which makes evaluation and early-stage use genuinely free.
- Open-source codebase plus a choice of US or EU (Frankfurt) cloud gives privacy and procurement teams inspectability and residency options most rivals lack.
- Usage pricing with automatic volume discounts and per-product spending caps scales from hobby project to hundreds of millions of events without a sales call.
Limitations
- No packaged B2B revenue attribution: connecting spend and touchpoints to CRM pipeline and closed-won revenue is a data-warehouse project in PostHog, not a built-in report as in Dreamdata or HockeyStack.
- Depth demands technical investment; non-technical marketers can read the web dashboard but will struggle to self-serve funnels, SQL insights, or warehouse joins.
- Usage-based billing is unpredictable without configured limits, and replay-heavy or autocapture-noisy sites can generate surprising invoices.
- The full event platform carries more GDPR surface than minimalist tools: consent, masking, and retention need deliberate configuration, where Plausible or Fathom are compliant nearly by default.
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
PostHog
Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features.
- Free (no card)$0
- Pay-as-you-goUsage-based
- Platform packages (Boost, Scale, Enterprise)$250 / $750 / $2,000
At small and mid scale PostHog is close to unbeatable on price: the permanent free tiers cover a real startup's entire measurement stack, and the per-unit rates undercut buying analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation separately. The honest caveat is that usage pricing shifts the budgeting burden onto you: a replay-heavy or event-noisy implementation can quietly cost more than a flat-rate point tool, and the platform packages needed for enterprise compliance add a fixed $250 to $2,000 a month. Treat it as extremely cheap by default and only as cheap as your instrumentation discipline at scale.
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 Business$200
- 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
PostHog
PostHog is the default recommendation in this category for any team with an engineer on it: no rival matches the combination of a free-forever tier that covers real workloads, usage pricing that scales without a sales call, and genuinely integrated replay, flags, and experimentation on top of web and product analytics. The two honest reservations are that marketing teams without technical support will use a fraction of it, and that B2B pipeline attribution, the question GTM leaders most want answered, remains a do-it-yourself exercise on PostHog's warehouse rather than a shipped feature. Buy it as the behavioral system of record; budget separately if you need turnkey revenue attribution.
Read the full PostHog profileUmami
Best ValueUmami 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 profilePostHog profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; Umami last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Self hosted Umami delivers funnels, retention, journeys, revenue, and a full API for the price of a VPS, with a free 100,000 event Cloud tier besides.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between PostHog and Umami?
PostHog is the maximal version of this idea: product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, and web analytics in one platform with a large free tier, at the cost of complexity and a cookie-setting architecture that usually needs a banner. Umami is a fraction of the surface area, cookieless, and self-hostable on a small VPS. Take PostHog if you are measuring a product; take Umami if you are measuring a website and want the consent banner gone.
Is PostHog or Umami cheaper?
PostHog starts at $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance). Umami starts at $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. PostHog pricing model: Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features. Umami pricing model: 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.
Does PostHog or Umami have a free plan?
PostHog has a free plan. 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1M data warehouse rows per month, on 1 project with 1-year retention. Trial terms: Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial. Umami has a free plan. Cloud Hobby is free with 100,000 events per month on one website and six months of data retention; self-hosting is free forever with no limits at all. Trial terms: 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path.
Who should choose PostHog?
Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it.
Who should choose Umami?
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.
What are the best alternatives to PostHog and Umami?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), HockeyStack (Momentum), Triple Whale (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
