Umami

Name: Umami
Brand: Umami
Price: 020 USD

MIT-licensed analytics you can self-host forever, or rent for twenty dollars

Umami is an open-source, MIT-licensed, privacy-focused web analytics platform that reports pageviews, visitors, referrers, UTM campaigns, custom events, funnels, retention, user journeys, goals, and revenue without cookies, fingerprinting, or personal data, and can be either self-hosted on your own infrastructure with Docker and Postgres or MySQL, or used as a managed cloud service starting free at 100,000 events a month.

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Overview

Umami exists because Mike Cao got tired of Google Analytics on his own projects in late 2020 and wrote a replacement, open-sourced from the first commit. The MIT licence is the fact that shapes everything else about the product: unlike Plausible's AGPL or Matomo's GPL, MIT places essentially no obligations on you, so a company can self-host Umami, modify it, embed it in its own product, and never pay or publish anything. That permissiveness is a large part of why the project accumulated tens of thousands of GitHub stars and millions of downloads while the hosted business was still small.

The feature set has grown well past pageview counting. Alongside the standard traffic, referrer, device, and geography reports, Umami now ships funnels, retention analysis, user journeys, goals, UTM campaign tracking, cohort breakdowns, custom events with properties, session-level inspection, revenue reporting, and attribution, plus a full REST API. That puts it closer to a lightweight product analytics tool than most of the privacy-first web analytics group, while still counting visitors without cookies, fingerprinting, or persistent identifiers.

Commercially there are two Umamis and the distinction matters. Umami Cloud is a managed service with a free Hobby tier at roughly 100,000 events a month across up to three websites with six months of retention, and a Pro plan at $20 a month for around a million events with unlimited sites, overages billed per event, plus a quote-only Enterprise tier. Self-hosted Umami is the same open-source software running on your own Docker host against your own Postgres or MySQL database, which costs whatever your server costs and gives you the raw event table to query directly.

The company is Umami Software, Inc., founded by Mike Cao with his brothers Brian and Francis, and it raised a $1.5M pre-seed led by Race Capital in July 2022. That is a small raise and a small company, which is worth knowing: the open-source project is durable regardless of what happens to the business, because MIT-licensed code with thousands of forks does not disappear, but the hosted service and the support behind it depend on a startup that has raised once.

Best for

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.

Not the right fit for

Non-technical buyers considering self-hosting; the Docker and database setup is small by engineering standards and still a real ongoing responsibility, and if nobody on the team can restore a Postgres backup you should be on Cloud or a fully managed competitor.
Performance marketers who need Google Ads conversion import and remarketing audiences; the cookieless design makes that impossible, so GA4 stays installed regardless.
B2B teams needing CRM-joined pipeline attribution across HubSpot or Salesforce; Umami reports site behaviour, not account journeys, which is Dreamdata and HockeyStack territory.
Teams that want session replay, heatmaps, or feature flags alongside analytics; Umami deliberately stays a metrics tool and PostHog covers that ground.
Buyers who need a large vendor with a staffed support desk, contractual SLAs, and a finished compliance package; this is a small company on a single pre-seed round, and the community is the support model on the self-hosted path.

How it works

1
You either sign up for Umami Cloud and get a tracking script, or you deploy the open-source build yourself. Self-hosting is a Docker container plus a Postgres or MySQL database, which is a genuinely small operational commitment: a two-dollar-a-month VPS handles a normal small business site, and the database is yours to query, back up, and retain forever.
2
The tracking script is under two kilobytes and sets no cookies, writes nothing to browser storage, and creates no persistent visitor identifier. Sessions are derived without storing personal data, which is the technical basis for the claim that no analytics consent banner is required and for the fact that Umami cannot build cross-site visitor profiles even if you wanted it to.
3
Custom events are fired either declaratively with data attributes on HTML elements, which non-developers can add, or programmatically through a JavaScript call, with arbitrary properties attached. Those events feed goals, funnels, retention analysis, user journeys, and revenue reporting, so conversion measurement does not stop at counting form submissions.
4
Everything in the interface is available through a REST API covering authentication, websites, events, and sessions, so custom dashboards, warehouse pipelines, and automated reporting are straightforward. On self-hosted installations you can skip the API entirely and query the Postgres tables directly, which is the single biggest practical difference from every managed competitor in this category.

Feature breakdown

30 features in 5 modules

Core web analytics

The everyday reporting, delivered from a script under two kilobytes.

Traffic dashboard: Pageviews, visitors, bounce rate, and session duration with top pages, entry pages, and exit pages, updating in real time on a single readable screen.
Referrer and channel reporting: Referrers, search engines, and direct traffic broken out so you can see where visits originate without configuring anything.
UTM campaign tracking: Source, medium, campaign, term, and content parameters parsed automatically, which is the reporting most small businesses use to judge whether an ad set or a newsletter worked.
Technology and geography breakdowns: Browsers, operating systems, devices, screen sizes, and countries, each clickable as a filter across the rest of the dashboard.
Realtime view: Live activity as it happens, useful for verifying a deployment and for confirming a launch actually landed.
Sub-2KB tracking script: The tag is small enough not to move Core Web Vitals, which is a real consideration on a site where the analytics script is competing with the content for load budget.

Events, funnels, and behavioural analysis

The reports that push Umami past the pageview counters it is usually grouped with.

Custom events with properties: Events fired declaratively via HTML data attributes or programmatically in JavaScript, each carrying arbitrary properties that become filterable dimensions.
Goals: Events or pageviews designated as conversions with rates reported against sources, campaigns, and pages.
Funnels: Multi-step conversion funnels with drop-off between steps, included in the open-source build rather than gated behind a business tier.
Retention analysis: Cohort-style retention showing whether visitors come back over subsequent days and weeks, which almost nothing else in the privacy-first group offers.
User journeys: Path analysis showing the sequences visitors move through, revealing where people leave a multi-page flow.
Session inspection: Individual session activity with session properties, which is as close to user-level analysis as a cookieless tool can honestly get.
Revenue and attribution reporting: Monetary values attached to events roll up into revenue by source and campaign, with attribution reporting on top, giving site-level ROI numbers without a CRM.
Custom dashboards: Saved dashboard layouts so different stakeholders see the metrics that matter to them rather than one fixed view.

Privacy architecture

Cookieless by construction, which is what removes the banner.

No cookies, no fingerprinting: The vendor's stated core principle is no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no personal data; sessions are derived rather than tied to a stored identifier.
GDPR compliant out of the box: Because no personal data is collected, there is nothing to disclose on a subject access request and no analytics justification for a consent banner.
No cross-site tracking: Visitors cannot be followed between properties, which structurally prevents the profiling European regulators object to in GA4.
Self-hosted data sovereignty: On a self-hosted install the data never leaves your infrastructure at all, which is a stronger claim than any managed vendor can make about residency, wherever their servers happen to be.
Inspectable open-source code: The full codebase is public under MIT, so every privacy claim can be verified rather than taken on trust.

Deployment and data ownership

The reason a developer picks Umami over anything else on this list.

MIT licence: The most permissive licence in this category: no copyleft obligations, so you can modify, embed, and commercialise the software without publishing your changes, unlike AGPL-licensed Plausible.
Docker self-hosting: A single container plus a database, deployable on a small VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or a Kubernetes cluster depending on how complicated you want to make your life.
Postgres or MySQL: Your analytics live in a standard relational database you already know how to back up, replicate, and query with SQL directly.
Unlimited sites and retention when self-hosted: There is no site cap and no retention window on your own instance, so an agency can run every client site on one deployment and keep history indefinitely.
Full REST API: Programmatic access to websites, events, sessions, and stats for custom dashboards and pipelines, on both Cloud and self-hosted.
Data export: Exports from the interface on Cloud, and on self-hosted the export is whatever SQL query you feel like writing.

Cloud service and team features

What you get for not running the server yourself.

Managed hosting with a free tier: Umami Cloud's Hobby plan covers roughly 100,000 events a month across up to three websites with six months of retention, at no cost and with no card.
Teams and shared access: Multiple users on a workspace with shared website access, so a marketing team is not passing one login around.
Shared dashboard links: Public or shared dashboards for clients and stakeholders who will never create an account.
Usage-based overages: Cloud Pro bills extra events at roughly $0.00003 each (about $3 per additional 100,000), so a traffic spike costs money rather than truncating your data.
Enterprise tier: Quote-only plan for higher volumes and organisations that need contractual arrangements beyond the self-serve plans.

Use cases

4 documented

Developer-led SaaS company

Wants analytics that never send customer data to a third party, and an engineer who would rather write SQL than learn a vendor's report builder.

A self-hosted Docker deployment against the company's existing Postgres puts every raw event in a table the team can join against their own product data, at the cost of a small server and no subscription at all.

Agency running thirty client sites

Per-site analytics subscriptions destroy the margin on small retainers, and clients still want branded dashboards.

One self-hosted instance carries every client site with no site cap and no retention limit, and shared dashboard links give each client their own view. The only recurring cost is the server.

Content site at 100,000 monthly pageviews

Needs referrer and campaign reporting plus some sense of whether readers return, without a consent banner or a growing bill.

Cloud's free Hobby tier covers roughly 100,000 events a month, which a 100,000-pageview site will exceed once custom events are added, so the realistic answer is either $20 a month on Cloud Pro or a self-hosted instance for the price of a VPS. Retention analysis is included either way, which the cheaper privacy-first competitors do not offer.

Startup replacing GA4 before a compliance review

Legal wants the consent banner gone and the data out of Google, and the team has an afternoon.

Umami Cloud's free tier gets a cookieless script live the same day with no banner, and the MIT licence means moving to a self-hosted instance later is a migration the team can do themselves rather than a vendor negotiation.

Pricing

from $0 self-hosted or on Cloud Hobby, then $20 per month (Cloud Pro)

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Self-hosted	$0 forever, plus your own infrastructure cost	MIT licence with no copyleft obligations Unlimited websites, events, and retention Docker plus Postgres or MySQL Full REST API and direct SQL access Funnels, retention, journeys, goals, and revenue included Realistically a few dollars a month of VPS, and the only option in this category where the raw event table belongs to you.
Cloud Hobby	$0 per month	Around 100,000 events per month Up to 3 websites 6 months of data retention Full reporting suite No credit card required
Cloud Pro	$20 per month, around 1M events included	Roughly 1 million events per month Unlimited websites Longer data retention Teams and shared dashboards Overage billed per event rather than cutting off data The event meter, not the site count, is what you need to model; custom events consume the same allowance as pageviews.
Cloud Enterprise	Custom quoted	Custom event volumes Extended retention Contractual arrangements and priority support

Billing notes

Cloud is metered on events, not pageviews, which is the trap: every custom event, outbound click, and form interaction consumes the same allowance, so an instrumented site burns through 100,000 far faster than its pageview count suggests.
Overages on Pro are billed at roughly $0.00003 per event, about $3 per additional 100,000, so a viral post costs a few dollars rather than silently truncating your reporting.
Self-hosting is genuinely free under MIT with no feature gating, no site limit, and no retention window; the cost is a small VPS and the responsibility for backups and upgrades.
The MIT licence is commercially significant compared with Plausible's AGPL: you can modify and embed Umami inside your own product without any obligation to publish your changes.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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.
On a self-hosted instance your data sits in your own Postgres or MySQL, queryable with SQL and retained forever, which no managed competitor can match on ownership.
A free Cloud tier at roughly 100,000 events a month with three sites lets a small business start at zero without touching a server.
A very large open-source community with tens of thousands of GitHub stars and millions of downloads, which means the software outlives any commercial outcome for the company.

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.
No CRM integration and no account-level attribution, which rules it out for B2B pipeline reporting.
No session replay, heatmaps, or feature flags, so teams wanting those alongside analytics will end up on PostHog instead.
Documentation and support are community-led on the self-hosted path, which is fine for engineers and frustrating for anyone else.

Head-to-head comparisons

6 alternatives

Umami vs Plausible Analytics

from $9/mo (Starter at up to 10k monthly pageviews)

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.

Full Umami vs Plausible Analytics comparison

Umami vs PostHog

from $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance)

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.

Full Umami vs PostHog comparison

Umami vs Pirsch Analytics

from $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews)

Pirsch is a managed German service at $6 to $12 a month with funnels, A/B testing, white labelling, and SDKs, and self-hosting only under an Enterprise contract. Umami gives you the same class of features for free on your own hardware, plus retention analysis, but nobody is on call when it breaks. Agencies who want white labelling without operations pick Pirsch; teams who want to own the database pick Umami.

Full Umami vs Pirsch Analytics comparison

Umami vs Simple Analytics

from $0 (free forever), then €20 per month

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.

Full Umami vs Simple Analytics comparison

Umami vs Counter

from $0 (pay what you want)

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.

Full Umami vs Counter comparison

Umami vs Google Analytics 4

from $0

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.

Full Umami vs Google Analytics 4 comparison

Implementation & onboarding

Setup time: 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 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.
Onboarding: Entirely self-serve on both paths. Cloud has a free tier and a 14-day Pro trial; self-hosting has documentation and a large community but no vendor hand-holding.
Migration notes: There is no built-in Google Analytics importer, so history does not come across; running GA4 in parallel for a quarter is the practical workaround. Moving between Cloud and self-hosted is possible because it is the same software, which is a portability guarantee no closed-source competitor can offer. Expect counts to differ from GA4's, since cookieless measurement with no consent banner sees visitors GA4 loses.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web app (Umami Cloud)Self-hosted via DockerPostgres or MySQLDeployable on VPS, Railway, Fly, Vercel, or Kubernetes
API: Full REST API covering authentication, websites, events, sessions, and statistics on both Cloud and self-hosted; self-hosted installations additionally allow direct SQL access to the underlying database.
Compliance: GDPRePrivacy (no cookies, so no analytics consent required)CCPA
Data residency: Entirely your choice when self-hosted, since the data never leaves your infrastructure; Umami Cloud is a managed service and residency should be confirmed with the vendor for a specific region.
SSO: Not a headline feature of the self-serve plans; enterprise arrangements are quote-only.
Security notes: MIT-licensed and fully public, so every claim about data handling is verifiable in source. No cookies, no fingerprinting, and no persistent identifiers means minimal personal data exists to protect. On self-hosted deployments, patching, backups, and access control are entirely the operator's responsibility.

Support & resources

Channels: Email support on Cloud plansGitHub issuesCommunity Discord
Documentation: Comprehensive public documentation at docs.umami.is covering installation, the tracking script, events, every report type, and the REST API.
Community: Very large open-source community: tens of thousands of GitHub stars, hundreds of contributors, an active Discord, and a long tail of third-party deployment guides.

Company

Founded: 2020
Headquarters: United States
Ownership: Venture-backed startup (Umami Software, Inc.) operating an MIT-licensed open-source project
Founders: Mike Cao, Brian Cao, Francis Cao
Employees: Small; a startup team around the founding brothers
Funding: $1.5M pre-seed led by Race Capital in July 2022.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Pre-seed	$1.5M	2022	Led by Race Capital, to grow the open-source project and launch the managed cloud service.

Timeline

2020Mike Cao builds Umami in late 2020 to replace Google Analytics on his own projects and open-sources it under MIT from the start.
2022Umami Software, Inc. raises a $1.5M pre-seed led by Race Capital; the project passes millions of downloads and over 100 contributors.
2023Universal Analytics shuts down and self-hosted analytics adoption surges among developer-led teams looking for a Google-free default.
2025The reporting suite expands well beyond pageviews with funnels, retention, user journeys, goals, revenue, and attribution in the open-source build.
2026Umami Cloud runs a free Hobby tier at roughly 100,000 events a month alongside a $20 Pro plan, with the self-hosted project still the larger story.

Integrations

WordPress, Ghost, Next.js, Nuxt, Astro, and most frameworks via community packages
Google Tag Manager deployment
REST API for custom dashboards and pipelines
Direct SQL access to Postgres or MySQL on self-hosted installations
Docker, Railway, Fly, Vercel, and Kubernetes deployment targets
Webhooks and custom event forwarding from your own backend

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is Umami?

Umami is an open-source, MIT-licensed web analytics platform that reports traffic, referrers, campaigns, events, funnels, retention, user journeys, goals, and revenue without cookies, fingerprinting, or personal data. It can be self-hosted with Docker and a Postgres or MySQL database, or used as a managed cloud service with a free tier.

How much does Umami cost?

Self-hosting is free forever under MIT with no site, event, or retention limits, so your only cost is the server. Umami Cloud has a free Hobby plan at roughly 100,000 events a month across three websites with six months of retention, a Pro plan at $20 a month for around a million events with unlimited sites and per-event overages, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.

Do I need a cookie consent banner with Umami?

Not for Umami itself. It sets no cookies, does no fingerprinting, and collects no personal data, so the GDPR and ePrivacy triggers that require an analytics consent banner are not met. Anything else on your site that does set cookies, such as advertising pixels or embedded video, may still require one.

Is self-hosting Umami actually practical for a small business?

If someone on the team is comfortable with Docker and a database, yes: it is one container plus Postgres or MySQL, and a small VPS handles a normal business site for a few dollars a month. If nobody can confidently restore a database backup, you are not saving money, you are accepting a risk, and Umami Cloud's free tier exists precisely for that case.

Why does the MIT licence matter?

MIT places essentially no obligations on you. You can modify Umami, embed it inside your own product, and ship it commercially without publishing your changes. Plausible's AGPL and Matomo's GPL are copyleft licences that impose conditions in those scenarios, so if you plan to build on top of the analytics rather than just run it, MIT is a materially different proposition.

How is Umami metered, and what does 100,000 pageviews cost?

Cloud is metered on events rather than pageviews, and every custom event counts against the same allowance as a pageview. A site with 100,000 monthly pageviews and any real event instrumentation will exceed the free 100,000-event Hobby tier, landing on the $20 Pro plan with roughly a million events included. Self-hosted, the same traffic costs whatever your VPS costs and nothing else.

Does Umami do funnels, retention, and attribution?

Yes, and this is what separates it from most cookieless competitors. Funnels with drop-off, cohort retention, user journeys, goals, revenue reporting, and attribution are all in the product, including the free self-hosted build. What it does not do is join to a CRM, so B2B pipeline attribution still belongs to tools like Dreamdata or Attribution.

Can Umami replace Google Analytics?

For traffic, campaign, conversion, funnel, and retention reporting, yes, and it will do it without a consent banner and with data you own. It cannot import conversions into Google Ads or build remarketing audiences, because that needs the cross-site identity work Umami refuses to do. If paid search is a real channel for you, keep GA4 alongside it.

Who owns my data and where does it live?

On a self-hosted install, entirely you: the events sit in your own Postgres or MySQL, retained as long as you like and queryable directly with SQL. That is a stronger sovereignty position than any managed vendor can offer, regardless of which country their servers are in. On Cloud, Umami hosts it and standard retention limits apply by plan.

Who is behind Umami and how stable is it?

Umami Software, Inc. was founded by Mike Cao with his brothers Brian and Francis, and raised a $1.5M pre-seed led by Race Capital in July 2022. That is a small company, so the hosted service carries normal startup risk. The open-source project itself is far more durable: MIT-licensed code with tens of thousands of GitHub stars and thousands of forks does not disappear if the business changes shape.

Editorial verdict

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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.