Plausible vs Umami

Last reviewed Aug 22, 2026 · 583 words

Both tools exist because Google Analytics became a compliance liability and a bloated one — each gives you a cookie-free, GDPR-friendly dashboard behind a ~1 KB script, no consent banner required. The product difference is real but modest; the operational difference is not, and for self-hosters it usually decides the matchup before the feature list gets a vote.

The self-hosting cost gap is the story

Umami is a TypeScript app plus PostgreSQL (or MySQL): two containers, ~512 MB of RAM, backups that are one pg_dump. It runs indefinitely on the smallest box in your rack, next to whatever else lives there.

Plausible's self-hosted Community Edition is Elixir plus PostgreSQL plus ClickHouse — the columnar database is what makes its queries fast at scale, and it's also the component that idles heavy (a gigabyte-plus of RAM), logs enthusiastically, and adds a second database technology to your backup and upgrade story. The practical floor is 2 GB and some tuning; on paper the catalogue says 1 GB, and you will not enjoy 1 GB. None of this is a criticism of the engineering — ClickHouse is the right tool for high-traffic analytics — but a personal blog doing 10,000 pageviews a month will never notice the speed and will notice the RAM. Note also the business reality: Plausible CE trails the hosted product, with some features (notably the newer funnels and detailed imports) reserved for the paid cloud; Umami's MIT-licensed self-hosted build is the product.

Feature and dashboard differences

Plausible's dashboard is the most polished in the category — one screen that answers "how is the site doing" faster than anything else, with goals, custom properties, UTM breakdowns, and (on cloud) funnels. Its year of extra maturity shows in small ways: better bot filtering, imports from GA, a public-dashboard option that's become the indie-web standard.

Umami counters with easy multi-site and multi-user management (genuinely nicer if you track a dozen small sites or share access), team features, an events API that's pleasant to build on, and a report set — retention, journeys, revenue — that has closed most of the gap in the last two years. Realtime views exist in both. Neither does session replay, heatmaps, or ad-attribution; if you need those you're in a different, more privacy-hostile category, and Matomo is the self-hosted middle ground.

Accuracy is identical in the way that matters: both are blocked by the same adblock filter lists, so both undercount similarly tech-savvy audiences. A first-party proxy for the script mitigates it equally for either; the details are in ditching Google Analytics.

Decision table

What I'd do

Self-hosting for personal sites: Umami, no hesitation — the SEO-analytics workflow runs fine on it and the server cost rounds to zero. If the Plausible dashboard is the one you love, be honest about the trade: either feed ClickHouse its 2 GB or pay for the hosted version and let the people who built it run it — both are reasonable, but running Plausible CE on a starved box is the one path that ends in disappointment.