Umami review

The only tool here that is free hosted and MIT licensed

Umami answers the question most site owners actually have, which is "how many people came, where from, and what did they look at", and it does it without cookies, without sampling, and without a consent banner. The dashboard is a single page: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, average visit time, then breakdowns by referrer, browser, OS, device, and country. You can add custom events for things like signups and downloads, build funnels from them, and since version 3.2 you also get session replay and click and scroll heatmaps.

What makes it our top pick is not any single feature. It is that Umami is the only tool in this category with both a free hosted plan and a permissive MIT license. Plausible and Matomo make you choose between paying for cloud or running your own server. Umami lets you start on the free Hobby plan today and move the same application to your own Postgres box in a year if the pricing or the company changes. That optionality is worth more than a slightly prettier chart.

Blogs, small SaaS, and EU teams dropping the banner

• Anyone replacing Google Analytics on a personal site, blog, or small SaaS
• Teams in the EU who want to drop the cookie banner and the GDPR paperwork
• Developers who want a free start now and a self-hosted exit later
• People who want event tracking and funnels without learning a product analytics platform

The Hobby plan is free, and the pricing page is unreadable

Umami Cloud's Hobby plan is free permanently. We could not read the exact event allowance on Umami's pricing page (it renders in the browser and returned nothing on 20 July 2026), and we would rather leave the number out than repeat a figure from a roundup site. Umami's own cloud documentation states plainly that the Hobby plan is completely free, and confirms that each pageview hit and each custom event counts as one event against your usage.

The self-hosted route has no ambiguity at all. The application is MIT licensed, which is about as permissive as software licensing gets, and there are no event caps, website caps, or feature gates. You need Node.js 18.18+ and PostgreSQL 12.14+, and there is an official Docker image. Paid Cloud subscriptions include a 14-day trial.

Five limits, starting with the ones Umami will not publish

• Umami does not publish its Cloud limits anywhere a machine can read them, which is a bad look for a tool whose main selling point is transparency
• Session replay and heatmaps are recent additions and noticeably thinner than Clarity's or Hotjar's
• There is no ecommerce revenue reporting worth the name, so retail sites will miss Matomo or GA4
• Self-hosting means you own backups, upgrades, and uptime. "Free if you can run Docker" is the honest framing
• The company is small (2 to 10 people, founded 2022), which is worth knowing if you are picking infrastructure for the next five years

We would install Umami first, with one thing to check

We would start almost anyone here. Umami covers the 90 percent of analytics that people actually look at, it is fast, it does not need a consent banner, and the MIT license means you are never trapped. If you need deep product analytics, PostHog is the better tool. If you need serious replay and heatmaps, Microsoft Clarity is free and better at that specific job. For everything in between, Umami is the one we would install first, with the caveat that you should confirm the current Cloud limits on Umami's own pricing page before you commit a high-traffic site to it.