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Umami
MITUmami is an open-source web analytics platform that replaces Google Analytics with cookieless tracking, custom events, and full data ownership.
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Overview
Mike Cao built Umami in 2020 after growing frustrated by the slow dashboards and regulatory overhead of Google Analytics. He wanted a self-hosted analytics tool that captured traffic metrics and custom events without cookies, heavy scripts, or third-party tracking. That containerized architecture gives teams custody over visitor telemetry without operational drag.
Why Umami instead of Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 anchors digital marketing, but its workflow demands configuring complex event tags, navigating nested exploration reports, and maintaining consent banners. Umami eliminates that compliance friction. Its tracking script measures roughly two kilobytes, loads without hurting Core Web Vitals, and records anonymized pageviews, referrers, and events without browser cookies. For small teams and agencies, that removes invasive cookie banners while collecting clean baseline traffic that ad blockers strip from Google Analytics.
The trade-off centers on depth versus clarity. Google Analytics leads in multi-touch attribution, audience remarketing, and integration with Google Ads bidding networks. Teams running high-spend ad campaigns cannot substitute Umami for that ecosystem. However, for product teams, publishers, and agencies tracking launch traffic, referral domains, and conversion goals, Umami replaces hours of report configuration with an immediate single-screen dashboard.
What it does well
- Cookieless tracking out of the box: Gathers pageviews, bounce rates, visit durations, and visitor countries without cookies, removing the need for GDPR consent banners.
- Multi-site management and shareable links: Lets agencies monitor hundreds of client domains from one installation and generate read-only URLs for external stakeholders.
- Custom event tracking via HTML: Tracks button clicks and form submissions through simple markup attributes without custom JavaScript triggers.
- Funnels and retention cohorts: Visualizes multi-step user drop-offs and cohort retention directly in the interface to evaluate onboarding flows.
- Lightweight deployment footprint: Runs as a Node.js process or Docker container backed by PostgreSQL, consuming minimal compute resources.
Limitations
- High-volume PostgreSQL table growth: Deployments logging millions of events encounter query slowdowns in the event table, requiring manual index tuning, data retention policies, or a ClickHouse backend.