Plausible Analytics vs Umami (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, licensing, and self-hosting.
Verdict: Both are cookieless, GDPR-friendly, and self-hostable. Plausible wins on hosted-product polish and active commercial development; Umami wins on cost when you self-host and want no feature gates or pageview caps under an MIT license.
Plausible is built in Elixir and sold as a $9/month hosted plan (billed by pageviews) that includes email digests, spike alerts, public dashboard embeds, and a track record of reliable uptime. Self-hosting is fully documented but requires running the Elixir/Phoenix stack alongside PostgreSQL — manageable, not trivial.
Umami is TypeScript, MIT-licensed, and designed to deploy to Vercel or Railway in minutes using a standard Node/PostgreSQL stack. The self-hosted version is completely free with no pageview limits or locked features; umami.is offers a cloud free tier for smaller sites. The trade-offs are a smaller integration ecosystem and the absence of built-in email reporting.
Call it: solo developers and bootstrapped projects comfortable with self-hosting should default to Umami — zero recurring cost, MIT license, and a dead-simple deploy. Teams that want a managed hosted product with a clear upgrade path and commercial support will find Plausible's $9 entry price easy to justify.
Plausible Analytics
Lightweight, cookieless web analytics that is GDPR-friendly out of the box.
Pros
- No cookies means legally simpler GDPR/CCPA compliance without a consent flow
- Sub-1 KB tracking script with no measurable page-weight impact
- Clean, single-page dashboard readable by non-technical stakeholders
Cons
- No session replay, heatmaps, or multi-step funnel visualization
- Less granular than GA4 for product analytics or A/B testing
Umami
Simple, self-hostable analytics with MIT licensing, no pageview caps, and a free cloud tier.
Pros
- MIT license — fully free to self-host with no feature gates or pageview limits
- Deploys in minutes to Vercel or any Node host without operational complexity
- Clean, minimal UI that is easy to hand off to non-technical teammates
Cons
- No native funnels, session replay, or A/B testing capabilities
- Cloud product at umami.is is less mature than Plausible's hosted offering
Plausible Analytics vs Umami: spec comparison
| Spec | Plausible Analytics | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Starting price | from $9/mo | Free / self-host |
| Pricing model | open-core | open-source |
| Language | Elixir | TypeScript |
| Platforms | web, self-hosted | web, self-hosted |
| Founded | 2019 | 2020 |
| GitHub stars | 21,000 | 26,000 |
FAQ
Plausible Analytics vs Umami: which is better?
Neither is universally better. Plausible Analytics (from $9/mo) suits Content sites, SaaS landing pages, and blogs that want accurate privacy-first traffic data without GDPR cookie-consent friction.; Umami (Free / self-host) suits Developers who want fully free, MIT-licensed analytics with no per-site pricing, no feature caps, and complete data ownership.. The spec table above breaks down the differences.
Is Plausible Analytics or Umami cheaper?
Umami starts lower at Free / self-host vs from $9/mo.