Plausible vs Umami

Plausible and Umami are the two names that come up first when you decide to drop Google Analytics for something you host yourself. Both give you clean, cookie-free, privacy-friendly stats from a single lightweight script tag, and both are a joy compared to the GA dashboard. The choice between them is not really about privacy — they are equally good there — it is about how much product you need and how much infrastructure you are willing to run to get it.

The same promise, a different weight class

Umami is the featherweight. It is a Next.js app backed by a single PostgreSQL database, and that is the entire stack. It installs in minutes, runs happily on a 1 GB box, and rates a friendly 2 out of 5 to deploy. The dashboard covers the essentials — page views, unique visitors, referrers, top pages, countries, devices — in a fast, clean single-page UI. It is MIT-licensed, which makes it about as unencumbered as self-hosted software gets.

Plausible is the more substantial product. Its Community Edition is an Elixir application that stores events in ClickHouse (with PostgreSQL alongside for app data). ClickHouse is a serious analytics database, and it is what lets Plausible stay fast as your event volume grows and power deeper reports. The trade-off is obvious the moment you deploy: this is a multi-container stack with a 2 GB realistic floor and a 3 out of 5 difficulty, and it is AGPL-3.0 licensed.

Reports: essentials vs. depth

This is where Plausible earns its heavier footprint.

• Plausible gives you funnels, custom goals and events, campaign/UTM tracking, and richer segmentation out of the box. If you need to answer "how many visitors made it from the landing page to signup," it does that natively.
• Umami covers the essentials extremely well — traffic, sources, pages, geography, devices — plus custom events and basic goal tracking. It is steadily gaining depth, but it is not trying to be a full funnel-analysis tool.

For a personal site, a blog, or a small SaaS just watching traffic and sources, Umami's report set is genuinely all most people use. Reach for Plausible when you specifically need funnels and richer goal analysis and are willing to run ClickHouse to get them.

Resources and operational cost

The stacks map directly to the spec rows. Umami is app plus one database — one extra service to babysit, one thing to back up, and a memory footprint small enough for the cheapest tier of VPS. Plausible is multi-container by nature: the Elixir app, ClickHouse, and Postgres, each with its own resource appetite and its own data to preserve. ClickHouse in particular likes RAM, and it is the main reason Plausible's floor sits at roughly double Umami's.

Neither is fragile, and both ship official Docker Compose setups. But if your goal is "stand it up, point a script tag at it, and forget it exists," Umami is the one with dramatically less to keep healthy over time.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Umami if…

• You want the lightest possible self-hosted analytics — a single database, a 1 GB box, and a setup you finish in minutes.
• The essential reports (visitors, sources, pages, geography, devices, custom events) are all you actually look at.
• A permissive MIT license and minimal operational surface matter to you.

Pick Plausible if…

• You need funnels, richer goal tracking, and a more mature, polished product, and the extra reporting depth is worth real infrastructure.
• You are comfortable running ClickHouse alongside Postgres and giving the stack a couple of gigabytes of RAM.
• You do not mind the AGPL license and a multi-container deployment.

Running either on a VPS

Both run fine on a single small server, but the headroom difference is real: Umami is content on a modest box, while Plausible wants roughly double the RAM to keep ClickHouse happy, and it is the one to size up for as your traffic grows. Whichever you pick, back up the database — that is where all your history lives — and expect Plausible to need a bit more attention over time thanks to the extra services. The step-by-step setups are linked below, and any of the VPS options here has plenty of room for the app plus its database.