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Umami

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Umami is an open-source, privacy-focused website analytics platform that can be self-hosted as a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics, tracking visitor metrics without cookies or collecting personal data.

Definition

Umami is an open-source, privacy-focused website analytics platform that can be self-hosted as a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics, tracking visitor metrics without cookies or collecting personal data.

Overview

Umami provides the core metrics most site owners want — page views, visitor counts, referral sources, and popular pages — through a simple tracking script and dashboard, positioned as a privacy-respecting alternative to larger analytics platforms. Because it avoids cookies and aims to minimize personal data collection, it's often chosen by teams who want usable analytics while staying closer to regulations like GDPR without building extensive consent-banner infrastructure. Being self-hosted, Umami is typically deployed as a small web application backed by a relational database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, and is commonly run via Docker for easy setup on a personal server or small cloud instance. This gives site owners full control over where their analytics data lives, which is a common motivation for choosing self-hosted tools over third-party SaaS analytics. Compared to full-featured commercial analytics suites, Umami intentionally keeps its feature set lean, focusing on the essential traffic metrics most websites and blogs actually use day to day rather than the deep funnel analysis and marketing-attribution tooling found in larger platforms.

Key Features

  • Lightweight, self-hosted web analytics dashboard
  • Cookie-less tracking designed to minimize personal data collection
  • Simple tracking script that's easy to add to any website
  • Core metrics: page views, unique visitors, referrers, and popular pages
  • Runs on common self-hosting stacks, often via Docker
  • Open-source codebase that can be inspected, self-hosted, or modified
  • Multi-site support from a single Umami instance

Use Cases

Self-hosting website analytics instead of relying on a third-party SaaS provider
Meeting privacy-conscious or regulatory goals by avoiding cookie-based tracking
Tracking basic traffic metrics for blogs, portfolios, and small business sites
Keeping analytics data under the site owner's own infrastructure control
Providing a lightweight alternative to heavier analytics suites for simple sites

Frequently Asked Questions