mcp-analytics vs Umami (2026)

Feature	mcp-analytics	Umami
License	Proprietary.	MIT (self-hostable, fork-able).
Cloud free tier	100k hits/mo, unlimited sites, no card.	1M events/mo, 3 sites.
Cloud paid entry	€19/mo for 10M hits, unlimited sites.	~$20/mo Pro for 100k events first paid tier (then volume tiers).
Self-hostable	No (Enterprise tier offers dedicated host).	Yes, main distribution path.
Dashboard UI	None. MCP-only.	Web dashboard, clean and minimal.
MCP server	Yes, primary interface. 23 tools.	No.
EU hosting	Hetzner Falkenstein (Germany).	Cloud is on AWS (US default; EU available); self-host wherever.
Cookieless	Yes (strict mode).	Yes by default.
Custom events	JS + server-side SDK on Pro.	JS-based; can call API directly.
AI / bot taxonomy	8 traffic classes including ai_user_action, ai_crawler.	Filters bots; no breakdown.
Data retention	1 year (Free) / 3 years (Pro) / custom (Enterprise).	Unlimited on paid; depends on storage on self-host.

Umami is the open-source darling of privacy-first analytics. MIT-licensed, self-hostable, generous free Cloud tier. They’ve built a community-loved product. The honest comparison:

Where Umami wins

Open source, MIT-licensed. The single biggest reason to pick Umami over anyone else. You can self-host it for free, fork it, contribute to it, audit the code. We’re proprietary. No version of us runs on your own infrastructure (except our Enterprise tier, which is single-tenant on Hetzner. Not the same thing as self-hostable code).

The biggest cloud free tier. Umami Cloud free is 1M events/month with 3 sites. Ours is 100k hits/month with unlimited sites. Different shape: they prioritize hits-volume, we prioritize site-count. If you run a single big site, Umami Cloud’s free is more generous. If you run a portfolio of small sites, ours is.

Self-hostable as the primary distribution path. Umami’s main story is self-host. You install it on your VPS, point your tracker at it, you control everything. If your operational philosophy is “I run my own stack”, Umami is the right answer.

Community. Big GitHub presence, many integrations, many contributors. We’re a single-founder shop.

Where we win

MCP-native primary interface. The entire reason we exist. Your analytics live in your existing Claude / ChatGPT / Cursor session, not in a browser tab. You ask in plain English, you get a sentence back.

You: "Top pages last 7 days on mysite.com."
Claude: "1. /pricing  - 4,212 views
        2. /blog/llms-txt-explained - 2,847 views
        3. / - 1,963 views
        4. /docs - 1,210 views
        5. /vs/plausible - 891 views"

Umami has an API, but no chat interface. To get the same answer, you open the dashboard or write code.

Unlimited sites on free. Umami Cloud’s free is capped at 3 sites. Ours has no site cap on any tier. If you’re an indie running a portfolio (main site plus half-finished side projects plus client sites), our free can absorb all of them.

Bot and AI crawler visibility. We classify traffic into eight buckets including ai_user_action, ai_crawler, verified_search_bot. Umami filters bots silently. By design they show you “real visitors only”. For a privacy-first analytics target audience that’s fine, but if you specifically want to know who’s crawling you (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), we surface it.

Server-side SDK (Pro). Ruby gem, npm package, pixel endpoint. Umami requires you to call the events API directly from your backend, which works but is more setup.

EU hosting by default. Umami Cloud is on AWS. You can pick the EU region, but the default is US. We’re on Hetzner Falkenstein, always.

Deploy-regression tracking on the Pro roadmap. A GitHub Action plus MCP tools to flag traffic anomalies caused by a deploy. Umami has no equivalent.

When you should pick Umami

Open source matters to you ideologically.
You want to self-host (no recurring SaaS bill, you control everything).
You have a single high-volume site and want to use the generous 1M-event cloud free tier.
You’re comfortable with self-host operations (DB backups, version upgrades, etc.).

When you should pick us

You spend hours daily in Claude or ChatGPT and want analytics inside that flow.
You run multiple sites and want them all under one account.
You want bot/AI-crawler breakdown, not silent filtering.
You want server-side event tracking from your backend (webhooks, cron, server-side conversions).
You want a managed service with no self-host operational burden.

What’s not a real difference

Both are privacy-first and cookieless.
Both have decent free tiers (different shapes).
Both serve the indie / SaaS / dev-tools market.

A note on the “should I self-host” question

The pragmatic answer: self-hosting Umami is a real ongoing cost. You need:

A VPS (Hetzner CX22 minimum, ~€5/month)
A managed Postgres or self-managed (more time, more risk)
A backup strategy
Version upgrades whenever a Umami release ships
DNS, SSL, monitoring

For a small site, the answer is often “Umami Cloud free tier is enough”. For a big site, you may actually be paying more in time-spent than our Pro tier (€19/month) would cost. We’re managed. Umami Cloud is managed too. Self-host is its own choice.

Migration

Both can run in parallel. Add our snippet alongside your Umami install (no conflict) and ask the same questions in both for a month. If you decide to move fully, dropping the Umami snippet is one line of HTML.

Try it

If you’re a self-hoster and want to evaluate without changing anything: add our snippet alongside Umami on one project, see if the chat workflow earns its keep.