Plausible Analytics vs Umami
| Tagline | Lightweight, privacy-first web analytics without cookies | Simple, fast, privacy-focused web analytics in a single lightweight dashboard |
| Category | Product & Web Analytics | Product & Web Analytics |
| Replaces | Google Analytics | Google Analytics |
| GitHub stars | 28k | 38k |
| Language | Elixir | TypeScript |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 3/5 Moderate |
| Deploy options | Docker Compose Manual | One-Click Docker Docker Compose Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 3 days ago | 3 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Plausible Analytics
- Intentionally simple: no heatmaps, session recordings, or user-level product analytics.
- The self-hosted Community Edition lags behind the paid cloud on some features and updates.
- ClickHouse dependency makes the stack heavier than a single-binary tool despite the simple feature set.
Umami
- Deliberately minimal: no heatmaps, session replay, or deep product-analytics like funnels/retention found in Mixpanel/Amplitude.
- Event/custom-property analytics are basic compared to dedicated product-analytics tools.
- No built-in alerting or anomaly detection.
Bottom line
Both are a similar lift to self-host; choose Umami for the larger community and ecosystem. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Umami
Simple, fast, privacy-focused web analytics in a single lightweight dashboard