Plausible Analytics vs Umami

The one question that decides this

This comparison comes down to what kind of "Google Analytics alternative" you actually want. Plausible Analytics frames itself as a "Simple, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative" and its GitHub description doubles down on "privacy-first," "lightweight," and "cookie-free." Umami also leads with "simple" and "privacy-focused," but its GitHub description is broader: it positions itself as an alternative not just to Google Analytics, but also Mixpanel and Amplitude. That is the split. Plausible is trying to replace the clean, basic web analytics layer without turning into a whole product-analytics empire, while Umami is presenting itself as a wider analytics platform.

What each one is actually trying to be

Plausible Analytics: the stripped-down, privacy-first analytics tool

Plausible Analytics is optimizing for restraint. Its tagline is "Simple, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative," and the GitHub description is even clearer: "Open source, privacy-first web analytics. Lightweight, cookie-free Google Analytics alternative. Self-hosted or cloud." That reads like a product making a deliberate promise to not become bloated, weird, or surveillance-shaped. In analytics, that already counts as a personality.

The important part is that Plausible keeps its pitch narrow. It says "web analytics" and "Google Analytics alternative," not "everything analytics teams might want after three roadmap meetings and a VC deck." That usually means the project is trying to solve the common case cleanly: traffic measurement, site-level insight, and privacy-sensitive deployment, without dragging users into the usual analytics-industrial-complex nonsense.

There is also a business-model tell here that matters. Plausible offers both self-host and official-cloud, and the official SaaS price is $9/month. That tends to attract users who want open-source credibility but would still rather pay a sane amount than babysit infra on a Tuesday night. In other words, Plausible is trying to be usable by normal people, not just the self-hosting priesthood.

Umami: the broader open-source analytics platform

Umami's one-line pitch is similar on the surface but wider in ambition. Its tagline says "Simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics," but the GitHub description expands the scope: "Umami is a modern, privacy-focused analytics platform. An open-source alternative to Google Analytics, Mixpanel and Amplitude." That one sentence tells you Umami is not just chasing the "clean replacement for GA" lane. It wants to sit in a bigger category.

That broader framing matters because it changes the target user. If you're comparing against Google Analytics alone, the bar is mostly about replacing traffic analytics without making the experience worse. If you're invoking Mixpanel and Amplitude too, you're signaling that you want to cover more of the analytics stack or at least appeal to teams shopping across those categories. Maybe that's what you want. Maybe it's also how projects slowly drift from "refreshingly simple" into "surprisingly busy." The description alone doesn't prove either outcome, but it does show a wider product posture.

Like Plausible, Umami supports self-host and official-cloud, and its official SaaS price is also $9/month. So this is not a clean "one is for hobbyists, one is for paying teams" split. Both are trying to serve both worlds. The actual difference is that Umami is casting a wider net around what kind of analytics buyer it wants to attract.

Head-to-head: the metrics

On raw GitHub popularity, Umami is ahead. It has 37,969 stars and 7,667 forks on umami-software/umami, while Plausible Analytics has 28,187 stars and 1,754 forks on plausible/analytics. Both projects show a last_push date of 2026-07-30, so by that metric both look very actively maintained. The licenses are meaningfully different: Plausible Analytics is AGPL-3.0, while Umami is MIT.

Those numbers are useful, but only if you don't pretend they mean more than they do. Stars tell you visibility and general developer interest; they do not tell you whether the project is a better fit for your team. Forks can suggest experimentation, contribution, or downstream customization, but they are still a fuzzy signal. A fresh last push is good because dead analytics tools are a bad joke, but "recently pushed" does not automatically mean stable, polished, or easier to operate. And license absolutely matters if you care about redistribution, commercial reuse, or internal legal review. An MIT license is about as low-friction as it gets. AGPL-3.0 is a real copyleft license with real implications, and pretending otherwise is the kind of hand-wavy open-source advice that gets people yelled at by legal later.

Open issues are fairly close in absolute terms, though not identical. Plausible Analytics shows 53 open issues; Umami shows 106. That can mean many things: more usage, more bug reports, broader scope, looser triage, or just different maintainer habits. It is a signal, not a verdict. Anyone treating open-issue count like a product-quality scoreboard is doing numerology with a GitHub UI.

Self-hosting

Plausible Analytics supports both self-host and official-cloud, and its deploy_difficulty is 2. That suggests self-hosting is part of the intended usage, not a begrudging checkbox. A 2 out of 5 is not "one click and enlightenment," but it does imply a relatively approachable setup. Combined with the project's very explicit lightweight, cookie-free, privacy-first pitch, Plausible looks like it wants self-hosting to be realistic for small teams that still have standards.

Umami also supports self-host and official-cloud, and its deploy_difficulty is 1. Based on the data provided, that makes Umami the easier self-hosting bet. Not magically easier in every environment, obviously, because real deployments have a way of discovering your weakest assumption at 4:40 p.m. But if you're deciding from metadata alone, Umami is signaling lower setup friction.

Community signals

There is at least some Hacker News visibility for both projects, though the recency is uneven. Plausible has hn_mentions_90d: 0, so there is no case for pretending it is currently bouncing around HN. The top HN story provided is "Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public," posted by trulykp, with 210 points and 76 comments. That's interesting as founder-story and business-context signal more than product chatter.

Umami has hn_mentions_90d: 1, and the top HN story provided is much more directly about the product: "Umami: Self-hosted open-source alternative to Google Analytics," posted by bananaoomarang, with 820 points and 227 comments. That's a strong visibility signal. It does not prove Umami is better, but it does suggest the project has had a serious amount of attention from the sort of crowd that loves self-hosted infrastructure and also loves arguing about analytics on the internet.

The Reddit data should be ignored here because it is obviously unrelated slop. Plausible's listed top Reddit post is "Wearing Power Armor to a Magic School (179/?)," and Umami's is about blackberry pizza in Oregon. That may be excellent for somebody, but not for software selection.

What we'd do

We'd pick Plausible Analytics for teams that want the narrower, cleaner replacement for Google Analytics and care about the privacy-first, lightweight, cookie-free framing enough to make that the deciding factor. We'd pick Umami for teams that still want a simple and privacy-focused tool, but prefer the broader "analytics platform" posture, want the easier self-hosting score, or need the flexibility of an MIT license. If your main fear is GA bloat, Plausible is the sharper bet. If your main fear is ending up boxed into a smaller definition of analytics later, Umami has the wider stance.