Umami vs Plausible for Solo Developers

Comparing Umami and Plausible for solo developers. Free self-hosted analytics vs paid hosted with self-host option. Features, costs, and which one fits a one-person stack.

Quick Comparison

Feature	Umami	Plausible
Type	Open source self-hosted analytics	Privacy-first analytics, hosted or self-hosted
License	MIT	AGPL-3.0
Latest release	v3.1.0 (Apr 16, 2026)	v3.2.1 (May 15, 2026)
GitHub stars	36,906	26,621
Free hosted tier	Yes, Hobby plan (100K events/mo, 3 sites)	No, 30-day trial then paid
Paid hosted entry	$20/mo Pro (1M events, 20 sites)	EUR 9/mo Starter (10k pageviews, 1 site)
Self-host database	Postgres or MySQL	ClickHouse plus Postgres
Best For	Devs who already run a Postgres database and want analytics for free	Devs who want a polished product they can pay for now and self-host later
Solo Dev Rating	8/10	9/10

Umami Overview

Umami is a self-hosted analytics tool built on Next.js with Postgres or MySQL as the backing store. It's MIT licensed, lightweight, and the dashboard is genuinely nice to look at. The tracking script is around 2KB and uses no cookies, so you're GDPR-friendly by default.

Setup is straightforward. Deploy the Docker container, point it at a Postgres database, and add the script tag to your site. For solo developers who already run a Postgres instance for something else, adding Umami costs you nothing beyond a few hundred MB of RAM. In practice the Node process sits around 200MB idle and roughly 400MB under load, so it fits comfortably on a small VPS. If you would rather not host it yourself, Umami Cloud has a genuinely free Hobby tier covering 100K events per month across up to 3 websites with 6 month data retention, and the first paid tier (Pro) is $20 per month for 1 million events and up to 20 sites.

The feature set covers what most people actually use. Pageviews, referrers, top pages, countries, devices, custom events, and goal tracking are all there. Real-time view exists. The API is REST-based and easy to query if you want to build custom dashboards or pull data into another tool.

Plausible Overview

Plausible is the more polished commercial alternative in the privacy-first analytics space. It's open source under AGPL-3.0, runs on Elixir/Phoenix, and the hosted version starts at EUR 9 per month for 10,000 pageviews on the Starter plan, billed in euros rather than dollars. There is no permanent free hosted tier, but you get a 30-day free trial with no credit card required, and yearly billing knocks two months off. The self-host route (Plausible Community Edition) is also fully supported, with an official Docker Compose setup that gets you running in a few minutes.

The product is sharper than Umami in a few specific ways. Funnels work well, ecommerce revenue tracking is built in, custom properties on events feel more thought through, and the public dashboard sharing feature is genuinely useful for portfolio sites or landing pages. The team has been shipping consistently for years.

The community around Plausible is also more active. The GitHub repo gets regular external contributions, the docs are excellent, and the company has a clear sustainable business model behind it. That matters for long-term confidence in a tool you're going to build into your stack.

Key Differences

Cost structure is the obvious one. Umami self-hosted is free forever if you already have a Postgres database running. Plausible self-hosted is also free, but the company nudges you toward the hosted version more aggressively. If you want a pure zero-cost analytics setup, Umami is the cleaner pick.

Hosted product quality is not equal. Plausible Cloud feels like a real SaaS product with good support, predictable uptime, and frequent feature updates. Umami Cloud exists and works, but it's a thinner offering with less momentum behind it. If you're going hosted, Plausible is the safer choice.

Database requirements differ. Umami needs Postgres or MySQL, which you already have or you don't, and it leans on Postgres jsonb for event properties so Postgres is the recommended store. Plausible Community Edition runs two databases in its Docker Compose, PostgreSQL for accounts and site config plus ClickHouse for the actual event storage. ClickHouse is a column store built for analytics, which is why Plausible's queries stay fast at scale, but it costs you memory. Plausible's own prerequisites recommend at least 2GB of RAM to run ClickHouse and the app without out-of-memory kills, and its host CPU needs SSE 4.2 or NEON support. Umami by contrast idles near 200MB. On a small VPS both work, but Plausible eats noticeably more RAM, and ClickHouse storage grows by roughly 1GB per million pageviews retained.

Feature depth slightly favors Plausible. Funnels, ecommerce revenue tracking, and public dashboard sharing are noticeably more polished in Plausible. Umami has goals and custom events but the UI for analyzing them is more bare-bones. For a content site or small SaaS, both cover the basics. For deeper product analytics, Plausible wins.

Licensing affects how you can use it. Umami is MIT licensed, so you can do basically anything with the code including embed it in a commercial product. Plausible is AGPL, which means any modifications you make and serve over a network must be open sourced. For most solo developers this never matters, but if you're thinking about white-labeling analytics into a paid product, the license difference matters a lot.

By the Numbers (2026)

Here is the verifiable state of both projects as of late May 2026.

Project health and adoption. Umami carries 36,906 GitHub stars and 7,205 forks against 132 open issues, with the most recent stable release being v3.1.0 on April 16, 2026. The repository has been around since July 2020. Plausible carries 26,621 stars and 1,564 forks against 70 open issues, with its most recent release v3.2.1 landing on May 15, 2026, and the repo dating back to December 2018. Umami has the bigger star count and a much higher fork count, which tracks with how many people self-host and tinker with it. Plausible is the older project and ships releases on a slightly tighter cadence.

Client library pull. On npm, Plausible's ecosystem libraries see heavier weekly install volume than Umami's, which makes sense given Umami is primarily consumed as a hosted app and a script tag rather than an installed package. For the week of May 22 to May 28, 2026, the plausible-tracker package pulled 36,782 weekly downloads and the popular next-plausible integration pulled 93,282, while Umami's @umami/node server-side client pulled 5,512. Treat these as ecosystem signals, not head-to-head usage, since the bulk of both tools' real traffic runs through a plain script tag that no package manager counts.

Umami Cloud pricing, exact. The Hobby plan is genuinely free at $0 per month and includes up to 100K events per month, up to 3 websites, 6 month data retention, and community support. Pro is $20 per month and includes 1 million events per month with overage at $0.00003 per additional event, up to 20 websites, up to 10 team members, and 2 year retention. Business is $200 per month with 10 million events included, $0.00002 per additional event, unlimited websites and team members, 5 year retention, plus session replays, heatmaps, white-labeling, and the streaming API. Every paid plan comes with a 14-day free trial. Note that Umami counts each pageview as one event, and each stored event property also counts as one event.

Plausible hosted pricing, exact. Plausible bills in euros. The Starter plan is EUR 9 per month for up to 10k monthly pageviews, one site, and 3 years of data retention. Growth is EUR 14 per month for up to 3 sites and up to 3 team members. Business is EUR 19 per month for up to 10 sites, up to 10 team members, 5 years of retention, plus custom properties, ecommerce revenue attribution, funnels and user journeys, and Stats API access at 600 requests per hour. There is no free tier, but the 30-day trial needs no credit card, and choosing yearly billing gives you two months free.

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

The two tools price on different units, which makes a direct compare slippery until you pin a workload. Umami Cloud sells events (each pageview plus each stored event property counts as one). Plausible sells pageviews. So pick a concrete solo-dev workload and run both meters.

Workload: one personal site plus two side projects (3 sites total), each doing 30,000 pageviews per month, so 90,000 pageviews per month combined, with light custom event tracking that adds maybe 10 percent on top in stored events.

Self-hosted, both: the software is free either way. Your only bill is the VPS. Umami fits on a 1GB box because the Node process idles near 200MB; call it the cheapest tier your provider sells. Plausible Community Edition wants at least 2GB of RAM for ClickHouse plus Postgres plus the app, so you are usually one VPS size up. On most providers that is the difference between roughly the entry box and the next one up, so Umami self-hosted is the cheaper monthly number, often by the price of a single VPS step.

Hosted Umami Cloud: 90,000 pageviews plus about 10 percent in event properties is roughly 99,000 events per month, comfortably under the Hobby plan's 100K event ceiling. And Hobby allows up to 3 sites. So this exact workload costs $0 per month on Umami Cloud. If your traffic creeps past 100K events you jump to Pro at $20 per month, which then carries you all the way to 1 million events.

Hosted Plausible: 90,000 pageviews exceeds the EUR 9 Starter tier's 10k pageview allowance, so you move up the pageview slider, and 3 sites also pushes you past Starter's single-site limit into Growth (up to 3 sites). At 90k pageviews across 3 sites you are paying for a Growth-class plan sized to roughly the 100k pageview band, which is materially more than zero. Plausible has no free hosted tier to fall back to once the trial ends.

The takeaway for this workload. If you want managed hosting and zero bill, Umami Cloud wins outright at this scale because the Hobby tier actually covers a real 3-site, 90k-pageview month for free. If you are self-hosting, Umami is still cheaper because it runs on a smaller VPS, since you avoid ClickHouse's memory floor. Plausible only starts to justify its price when you need what it does better, funnels, ecommerce revenue attribution, and polished shared dashboards, which the next section gets into. Convert EUR to your currency at checkout and check current pricing before committing, since both vendors adjust tiers over time.

When to Choose Umami

You already run a Postgres or MySQL database and want free analytics
You want true zero-cost self-hosting forever
MIT licensing matters for your potential use case
You're comfortable maintaining your own deployment
You only need standard pageview, referrer, and event analytics

When to Choose Plausible

You want a polished hosted product with good support
You need funnels, revenue tracking, or public shared dashboards
You want the option to self-host later but start hosted
You prefer paying $9/mo to never think about analytics infrastructure
You want the active community and clear long-term momentum

The Verdict

For solo developers who already have infrastructure running, Umami is the obvious pick. It's free, the dashboard is clean, the database load is light if you point it at an existing Postgres, and the MIT license keeps your options open.

For solo developers who want a hosted analytics tool with momentum and polish, Plausible is the better product. The $9 entry price is fair, the feature set is genuinely deeper for product-style analytics, and the hosted experience is significantly more polished than Umami Cloud.

The split decision is pretty clean. If you're optimizing for cost and you have infrastructure, run Umami. If you're optimizing for product quality and you're willing to pay the monthly bill per project, pick Plausible. The middle ground (self-hosting Plausible to avoid the bill) works but eats more server resources than self-hosting Umami, since you are running ClickHouse alongside Postgres, so if free is the goal, Umami still wins.