Umami vs Plausible: Which Privacy-First Analytics Is Right for You?

Umami's Free Tier Changes the Math

Umami offers 100K events monthly free. Plausible starts at $9/month for 10K pageviews. If you're below those thresholds, Umami costs nothing. If you exceed them, both scale: Plausible charges per pageview bucket, Umami charges per event bucket.

For small sites with 5-10K monthly pageviews, Umami's free tier eliminates the decision. For growing sites pushing 50K+ pageviews, you'll pay either way—but which platform offers better value depends on feature needs, not just price.

Neither product charges per seat. Both handle unlimited team members on their plans.

PostgreSQL vs ClickHouse: What This Means for Your VPS

Umami runs on PostgreSQL. Plausible runs on ClickHouse. This is not a marketing difference—it's a hardware difference.

PostgreSQL is lighter. It runs on $5-10 VPS with 1GB RAM. ClickHouse is heavier. It needs more memory and CPU to perform at scale. If you self-host Plausible, expect to provision at least $20-30/month infrastructure just to handle the database.

Umami on a cheap VPS will outperform Plausible on the same hardware. For startups and solo founders choosing self-hosted, this cost difference compounds. Opsily eliminates the infrastructure math—you get optimized servers and automatic backups for a fixed price.

MIT vs AGPL-3.0: When License Type Matters

Umami is MIT-licensed. You can use it, modify it, and resell it without restriction.

Plausible is AGPL-3.0-licensed. If you modify it, you must open-source your changes. If you integrate it into a commercial product, you must open-source the whole product. This is not a problem if you're using it as-is. But it prevents you from creating a proprietary analytics product on top of Plausible.

For most teams running a private instance for their own site, license doesn't matter. For SaaS founders or agencies planning to build on the analytics platform, Umami's MIT license removes a future legal constraint.

GitHub Stars Tell a Story

Umami has 38.9K GitHub stars and 6,855 commits. Plausible has 29.1K stars and 4,401 commits. Umami's higher commit count suggests more active development. Umami's larger fork count (8.1K vs Plausible's 1.9K) suggests stronger community customization.

This doesn't mean one is "better." Plausible's smaller but focused community produces a more polished cloud product. Umami's larger developer base drives more features and self-hosted flexibility.

Pick based on what you need, not the star count.

When DIY Self-Hosting Becomes Too Much

Both Umami and Plausible advertise self-hosting as simple. The truth: it's simple until it's not.

Self-hosting means you own:

• Database backups (and restore testing)
• Security patches (watching GitHub for CVEs every week)
• Hardware scaling (your analytics die when traffic spikes)
• SSL certificate renewal (automatic, but you need to monitor)
• Monitoring (is it down? You won't know unless you watch)

Managed hosting means Opsily owns all of this. Your analytics run on isolated EU infrastructure. Automatic nightly backups. Patches applied the day they ship. Uptime monitoring 24/7. No credit card to renew.

For busy founders and small ops teams, managed hosting is not a luxury—it's insurance that your analytics won't go dark on a Saturday at 2 AM.