Simple 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
Both sides assessedSimple Analytics compared with Umami
Umami is MIT-licensed and self-hostable, so a technical team can run it on their own server for the cost of infrastructure and own the database outright, and its cloud free tier gives 100,000 events a month. Simple Analytics is fully managed with no server to patch and a more generous hosted free allowance. Developers who want the data in their own Postgres pick Umami; everyone else picks Simple Analytics.
Umami compared with Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics is fully managed, EU-hosted, and has a free forever tier with unlimited pageviews under fair use, but no funnels, no retention, and €20 per extra seat. Umami is metered on events rather than pageviews and gives far deeper behavioural reporting, especially self-hosted. Non-technical solo operators pick Simple Analytics; technical teams pick Umami.
Choose Simple Analytics if
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
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 | Simple Analytics | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (free forever), then €20 per month (free plan available) | $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Freemium with a free forever plan, one flat self-serve paid plan priced by pageview volume via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier. | 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 | Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. | 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 | 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required | 14 days on Cloud Pro; the free Hobby tier also serves as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding. | 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 ten minutes: paste one script, install the WordPress plugin, or deploy through Google Tag Manager, and data appears immediately. Proxying through your own domain for blocker resilience takes an extra half hour of DNS and routing 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 | Effectively none for the dashboard, which is the entire design goal. Events, the export API, and the BI connectors are the only pieces 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 (EU-hosted cloud), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio connector, Power BI connector | Web app (Umami Cloud), Self-hosted via Docker, Postgres or MySQL, Deployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes |
| Compliance | GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and PECR, CCPA, CNIL and DSGVO alignment, SOC 2 in progress | GDPR, ePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required), CCPA |
| Founded | 2018 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands | United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; 100 percent owned by its founders with no outside investors | Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project |
Strengths and limitations
Simple Analytics
Strengths
- A free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use and five websites, which no other serious privacy-first tool matches on volume.
- Flat €20 pricing up to 2.5 million pageviews means most small businesses never have to model a traffic slider or worry about overages.
- The strongest privacy architecture claims in the group: no cookies, no browser storage, no IP storage, no visitor IDs, EU hosting under a Dutch entity.
- The traffic recovery positioning is commercially honest, acknowledging that most businesses will keep GA4 and selling a complement rather than pretending a replacement is realistic.
Limitations
- Per-seat pricing at €20 per additional user is expensive relative to competitors that bundle three to ten team members into the base price.
- The free plan's 30-day history window means trend analysis and year-over-year comparison are impossible without paying, unlike free tiers that limit volume instead.
- SOC 2 is described as in progress rather than complete, which will stall some procurement reviews that a competitor with a finished report would pass.
- SSO, role-based access, and raw data access sit behind a demo-gated Enterprise tier, so the self-serve product has a hard ceiling for larger teams.
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
Simple Analytics
Freemium with a free forever plan, one flat self-serve paid plan priced by pageview volume via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
- Free€0
- Self-serve (paid)€20
- EnterpriseCustom
The free plan is the most useful free offer in privacy-first analytics because it does not meter your traffic, and for a small site the 30-day history limit is genuinely liveable for months. The €20 paid plan buys unusual headroom, since 2.5 million pageviews for a flat fee undercuts what Plausible or Fathom charge at the same volume. The value breaks down on teams: at €20 per extra seat, a marketing department of five costs €100 a month for a tool whose competitors bundle ten users, so this is best value as a one-person or two-person purchase and worst value as a departmental one.
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
Simple Analytics
InnovationSimple Analytics is the most sensible starting point in privacy-first analytics for a one-person or two-person business, because the free plan gives you unlimited traffic on five sites and only asks for money when you want history back. The €20 paid plan buys unusual pageview headroom, the AI assistant is a better interface than any report builder for non-analysts, and the Dutch EU-only architecture is the cleanest answer available to a European privacy review. Two things to check before buying: seats cost €20 each, which makes it a poor fit for a marketing department of five, and SOC 2 is still in progress. The traffic recovery pitch is the most honest thing any vendor in this category says out loud, which is that you are probably not deleting GA4, so buy the tool that gives you the numbers you can actually trust while Google keeps feeding your ads.
Read the full Simple 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 profileSimple 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.