Umami is free twice over, and only one of those routes has a published ceiling

73 puts Umami in our Strong band, and it is held down by a missing fact rather than a missing feature. Generosity scores 78, which is the certain half of the story: an MIT license with no caps is as far as free goes, and we are not crediting the hosted plan with an allowance nobody has shown us.

Freedom at 84 is where Umami earns its rank. Cookieless tracking means no consent banner for your visitors, and the same application moves to your own Postgres server whenever you decide it should, which no other tool at the top of this category offers. PostHog scores higher overall at 78 on the strength of a much deeper product, and Microsoft Clarity at 77 on an uncapped free tier, but neither gives you both a free hosted start and a real exit. The pillar reasoning below has the detail on all four.

The self-hosted route is the easy half to describe: no event limit, no website limit, nothing held back from the paid Cloud build. What it costs instead is Node.js 18.18 or newer, PostgreSQL 12.14 or newer, and somebody who owns backups, upgrades and uptime. There is an official Docker image, which makes it roughly a fifteen-minute job for anyone who has deployed a container before and an unpleasant afternoon for anyone who has not.

The hosted Hobby plan is where the ambiguity lives (as of July 2026):

• The event allowance is not published anywhere machine-readable. Umami's pricing page renders in the browser and returned nothing when we checked on 20 July 2026, and we will not repeat a figure from a roundup site.
• Umami's own cloud docs do confirm that Hobby is completely free and that each pageview and each custom event counts as one event against your usage, so the meter exists even though the number does not.
• Paid Cloud subscriptions include a 14-day trial, and we hold no verified price for the Pro tier.

Product gaps to weigh separately from the pricing: session replay arrived in 3.1 and heatmaps became a first-class report in 3.2, and both are thinner than what Clarity does. There is no ecommerce revenue reporting worth the name. Umami Software has been going since 2022 with a small team, which is worth knowing if you are choosing infrastructure for five years.

The self-hosted ladder has one rung on it and that rung is free. MIT is about as permissive as software licensing gets, so there is no upgrade to be sold, no quota to be lifted and no part of the product waiting behind a plan name. Your costs are a small server and your own attention.

The Cloud ladder is Hobby then Pro, where Pro buys higher event volume, more websites, longer retention and email reports. We are not quoting its price, and that is a decision rather than a gap in our reading: Umami's pricing page is client-rendered and we could not read it first-party, so the number stays out. Check umami.is/pricing yourself before you plan around it.

That leaves an odd situation worth naming plainly. A tool whose main pitch is transparency does not publish the limits of its own free plan in a form anyone can verify, and that is the one thing about Umami we would change. It does not make the free plan worse, it makes it unplannable, which for a high-traffic site amounts to the same thing.

The practical answer if the ambiguity bothers you: run it yourself, where the terms are written down in a license file instead of a marketing page.

Yes. We are landing a band above where a 73 usually sits, and the reason is that one of the two free routes has no ceiling at all: an MIT license, no event cap, no website cap, nothing that counts down. That is not a free plan you grow out of, it is software you own.

The hosted half is genuinely free too, and the honest caveat is that we cannot tell you how far it goes. For a personal site, a blog or a small SaaS, Hobby covers the job and has for years. For anything with real traffic, confirm the current allowance on Umami's own pricing page or skip the question and self-host.

Who this suits: anyone replacing GA4 who wants the consent banner gone and does not want to be trapped later. Who it does not: teams needing deep product analytics, where PostHog's free plan is a better fit, and anyone whose actual question is why a page converts badly, where Microsoft Clarity's free plan does replay and heatmaps with no cap.

Free Umami alternatives covers the rest, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.