Umami

What Umami actually is

Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. It is a privacy-first analytics platform for tracking traffic, campaigns, behavior, conversions, and revenue in one place, without cookies or surveillance. The pitch is straightforward: give website owners useful analytics without handing every visitor’s browsing behavior to Google, and let teams run the system themselves or use Umami’s official cloud service.

Live GitHub stats

Umami currently has 39,047 stars on GitHub, uses the MIT license, and its primary language is TypeScript. The repository’s last push was on 2026-09-26, with 123 open issues. Those are useful signals: Umami has substantial public interest, a permissive license, and recent development activity, while the open issue count suggests a project with a real user base rather than a neglected demo repository.

The numbers do not prove that Umami is the right analytics platform for every organization. Stars are not a support contract, and recent commits do not tell you whether every feature you need is mature. Still, the project has enough adoption and visible maintenance to take seriously, which already puts it ahead of many “privacy-friendly analytics” projects that are mostly landing page and vapor.

What it's good at

Umami is aimed at teams that want the core answers from web analytics without adopting Google Analytics’ broader tracking ecosystem. You can use it to understand traffic, campaign performance, visitor behavior, conversions, and revenue from a single analytics platform. That makes it a sensible fit for independent sites, product teams, agencies, and businesses that need actionable measurement but do not want privacy objections to become part of every analytics discussion.

The strongest part of the proposition is the balance between ownership and convenience. Self-hosting gives you control over the deployment and the data, while official cloud hosting removes the operational work for teams that would rather pay than maintain another service. It is not trying to be a giant marketing intelligence suite, and that restraint is part of the appeal: for many sites, “show me what is happening without building a surveillance apparatus” is a perfectly adequate analytics strategy.

Umami also benefits from being a direct replacement rather than an abstract privacy project. If your current requirement is basic-to-serious website analytics and your current answer is Google Analytics, Umami gives you a more focused option with a clearer privacy posture. The question is less whether it can reproduce every corner of Google’s product and more whether those corners are worth the complexity, tracking baggage, and administrative overhead in the first place.

What to watch for

The MIT license is a meaningful advantage: there are no AGPL obligations or source-available restrictions to navigate when using or modifying the project. The tradeoff is operational, not licensing-related. Self-hosting still means owning upgrades, backups, database health, access control, and the consequences of getting analytics infrastructure wrong, even though Umami’s deploy difficulty is rated 1 out of 5. The project was last pushed on 2026-09-26, so it appears actively maintained based on the supplied GitHub signal, but active maintenance does not guarantee that releases, migrations, integrations, or support will match your organization’s expectations.

You should also be realistic about the Google Analytics comparison. Umami can cover the analytics use case described by the project, but replacing a large platform feature-for-feature is a different claim from replacing it for your website. If your team depends on highly specialized reporting, a deep advertising ecosystem, or a long list of third-party integrations, validate those requirements before switching. “Privacy-first” is a useful architectural and product goal; it is not a magic spell that makes every analytics workflow simpler.

How to deploy

You can deploy Umami on your own infrastructure or use the official cloud offering, which starts at $9 per month. Self-hosting is commonly handled with Docker or Docker Compose, making it approachable for teams already running containerized web services; the exact deployment path still depends on your database and hosting environment. For the maintained deployment instructions and provider-specific guidance, see the Umami deployment guide.

Related tools

For more projects that replace Google Analytics, browse the Google Analytics alternatives page. That is the better comparison point for weighing Umami against other privacy-focused and self-hosted analytics options, especially if you care about deployment model, reporting depth, or managed hosting rather than simply looking for another dashboard.