Umami is the open-source darling of privacy-first analytics. MIT-licensed, self-hostable, with a real 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 in our EU infrastructure. Not the same thing as self-hostable code).

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.

The free-tier shape. Both cloud free tiers cover 100k events or hits a month. From there ours is more generous: unlimited sites (Umami’s Hobby allows 3) and a year of retention (Hobby keeps about six months). 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 and remember the whole year.

Bot and AI crawler visibility. We classify traffic into eight buckets including ai_user_action, ai_training, ai_search, search_index. 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 tracking (Pro): an HTTP ingest endpoint with a per-site secret, plus a first-party Rack middleware (Ruby) available now; npm package and pixel endpoint are on the roadmap. Umami requires you to call the events API directly from your backend, which works but is more setup.

EU hosting, always. Umami Cloud runs on servers in the US and EU. We’re EU-hosted in Germany, full stop, no region picking.

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’re comfortable with self-host operations (DB backups, version upgrades, etc.), which makes volume effectively free.

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 cookieless, no cookie banner needed.
  • Both have real free cloud tiers at the same 100k monthly volume.
  • 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 small EU VPS (~€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

Sign up free, 100k hits/month, unlimited sites, no card.

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.