Umami vs Plausible vs Simple Analytics (2026)
Every founder I know has the same analytics setup. Google Analytics 4 loads, they look at it twice, get confused, and never open it again. Meanwhile the GDPR banner they bolted on to keep GA4 “compliant” costs them signups they never measure.
I’ve been on the other side of that for a while now. This site runs without a cookie banner, and I can tell you exactly which posts earn money, where readers drop off, and which one Reddit thread sent 400 visitors last Tuesday. That’s not a GA4 success story. It’s what happens when you pick a tool that gives you six useful numbers instead of forty useless ones.
Two open-source options keep coming up in founder Slack groups: Umami and Plausible. Simple Analytics is the paid one in the corner that doesn’t get talked about enough. Here’s how they actually compare for a one-person company, based on vendor docs, public pricing pages, and the setup docs I’ve read through more than once.
Why Founders Keep Leaving GA4
Google Analytics 4 wasn’t built for a solo founder. It was built for an enterprise marketing team with an analyst who owns it full time. The interface assumes you know what an “exploration” is and why you’d want one.
The bigger issue is legal. If you have EU visitors, GA4 means a consent banner, a data processing agreement, and a nagging worry about the next Schrems-style ruling. Plenty of founders just ship the banner and hope. That works until it doesn’t.
Privacy-friendly analytics takes the opposite approach: no cookies, no personal data, so no consent banner needed in most cases. You lose user-level tracking. You keep every number that actually influences a business decision, pageviews, referrers, entry pages, countries, and which post earns affiliate clicks.
The Three Contenders at a Glance
| Feature | Umami | Plausible | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, 100K events/mo, 1 site | No (30-day trial) | No (14-day trial) |
| Entry price | $0, then $20/mo | $9/mo (Starter) | Around $15/mo on annual, higher monthly |
| Open source | Yes (MIT) | Yes (AGPL) | No |
| Self-host free | Yes | Yes (community edition) | No |
| Script size | ~2 KB | ~1 KB | ~2 KB |
| Cookie banner | Not needed | Not needed | Not needed |
| Session replay / heatmaps | Business tier | No | No |
| Data export / API | Yes | Yes | Yes (limited) |
| Best for | Hackers who might self-host | Simplest paid setup | Set-and-forget buyers |
Prices above come from each vendor’s public pricing page as of October 2026. Plausible’s $9 Starter covers one site; Growth at $14 adds team seats and more sites. Umami’s $20 Pro tier includes 1 million events per month with up to 20 sites.
Umami: The One I’d Self-Host
Umami is MIT-licensed, which matters more than it sounds. MIT means you can run it commercially, fork it, and modify it without the copyleft obligations that come with AGPL. Plausible is AGPL. For most founders that distinction is academic, but if you ever want to embed analytics inside a product you sell, it stops being academic fast.
The self-hosted path is genuinely simple: one Docker container, one Postgres database, and a reverse proxy in front. I run Docker for plenty of other things around here, and Umami’s compose file is about as friendly as this category gets. You point a subdomain at it, paste a script tag into your header, done. That setup costs whatever your VPS costs, a $5 to $10/month box handles a surprising amount of traffic.
The tradeoff is that you now own uptime. If the container dies at 2am you lose data for however long it takes you to notice. Umami buffers events client-side and retries, but it isn’t magic. If you don’t want to own that, pay the $20.
On the paid side, the Hobby tier is free with 100K events per month and one website, which is enough for most pre-revenue projects. Pro at $20/month gives you a million events and up to 20 sites. Business jumps to $200 for 10 million events, heatmaps, and session replays. That’s a big jump for a solo founder, and I’d argue most people never need it.
What I like: the dashboard loads in under a second, and it shows you the four things a founder actually reads, visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, average visit time, above the fold. What I don’t like: the funnel and retention features are thinner than Plausible’s, and the self-hosted upgrade process is a manual Docker pull every time.
Plausible: The Boring Good Choice
Plausible is the tool that made this category mainstream, and it still has the cleanest out-of-box experience. Sign up, paste one line, see data. No configuration, no dashboard to learn.
The pricing is friendlier at the bottom: $9/month for one site, $14 for three sites and three team members, $19 for ten sites. If you have a portfolio of side projects, that $14 Growth tier is the sweet spot. Nobody else is offering three sites for fourteen bucks.
Plausible’s strengths are funnels and custom goals. You can define “signed up for the newsletter” as a goal and watch conversion by traffic source. For a founder running an email list, that’s a real feature, not a checkbox. It also has solid documentation and a responsive team, which sounds trivial until you’ve waited four days for a reply from a smaller vendor.
The catch: Plausible is AGPL and their business model depends on people not self-hosting. The community edition exists, but it lags behind the cloud product and you’re on your own for support. Also, no session replays. If you want to see where people click, you’re adding a second tool.
Simple Analytics: Pay Once, Stop Thinking
Simple Analytics is closed source and doesn’t try to be clever. It collects the basics, shows them in a friendly UI, and has a “what should I do next” panel that literally suggests actions based on your data. Their marketing leans hard on being the tool for people who don’t want to think about analytics, and honestly, that’s a fair pitch.
Their pricing runs higher than the competition, roughly $15/month billed annually at the entry tier, more month-to-month. There’s no free plan, only a trial. You’re paying for polish and support rather than features.
I’m not going to pretend I’ve used this one hands-on. What I can say from reading their docs and public reviews: the EU-hosted data story is clear, the dashboard is prettier than Umami’s, and the export options are the weakest of the three. If you have a lawyer asking where your analytics data lives, Simple Analytics makes that conversation a two-minute call.
Head-to-Head: What Actually Matters
Cost at founder traffic levels
At under 100K monthly events, Umami is free and Plausible is $9. Simple Analytics is roughly $15. Once you pass 100K, Umami’s Pro at $20 covers a million events, while Plausible’s ladder climbs with pageviews, you’ll be paying $19 to reach ten sites, but higher traffic bands cost more.
Rough math for a blog doing 300K pageviews a month:
- Umami Pro: $20/month flat up to a million events
- Plausible: steps up through their volume tiers, generally more than $20 at this level
- Simple Analytics: volume-based tiers, comparable to Plausible
If you’re growing fast, Umami’s flat Pro ceiling is the cheapest predictability in the category. If you’re stable and small, Plausible’s $9 is the cheapest entry.
The cookie banner question
All three are cookieless and don’t fingerprint visitors, which is why founders pick them. That does not automatically mean you’re compliant with every jurisdiction, consent rules differ, and the EU’s guidance is a moving target. The honest version: these tools remove most of the GDPR headache, but they don’t remove your obligation to read the rules for your market.
Self-hosting: who really wants it
Here’s where I think the comparison gets decided. Umami and Plausible both let you self-host. Umami’s MIT license makes it the safer bet if you might ever build on top of it. Plausible’s AGPL is fine for running analytics on your own site, but if you modify it and offer it as a service, you’re publishing your changes.
Self-hosting saves money only if your time is genuinely free. A $5 VPS beats a $20 subscription every month until the box crashes on a Saturday and you spend three hours fixing it. For most founders that calculus favors paying.
Integrations that matter for affiliate sites
All three support custom events, which is how you track outbound clicks on affiliate links. Umami’s event API is documented clearly and easy to fire from a small script. Plausible’s goals UI means you can define the event without touching the code twice. If your monetization depends on knowing which post drove a sale, both work. Umami gives you more control; Plausible gives you less setup.
Worth saying plainly: if you’re publishing on WordPress, all three have plugins, and all three involve pasting a script tag into your theme’s head. It takes about four minutes. I’ve done the Plausible version on a WordPress site and the only surprise was how much faster pages felt afterward compared to GA4’s script.
What I’d Pick for Specific Founder Situations
- One product, pre-revenue, no budget: Umami Hobby. Free, one site, 100K events. Nothing else comes close on cost.
- Three side projects and a real email list: Plausible Growth at $14. The multi-site coverage and goal tracking justify it.
- You want zero maintenance and have revenue: Simple Analytics. You’re buying time, and that’s a legitimate purchase.
- You have a VPS and enjoy owning things: self-hosted Umami. Cheapest long-run option, best license terms.
- You’re building analytics into a product you sell: Umami, MIT license, no questions.
A Few Things None of Them Solve
Privacy analytics won’t tell you that a specific visitor from Austin read four pages and then bought. That level of tracking requires cookies and identity, which is exactly what you gave up. If your business needs attribution down to the person, you need a CRM and event pipeline, not a pageview counter.
None of them replace Search Console for SEO either. They tell you traffic arrived from Google; Search Console tells you which query brought it. Run both.
And all three will mislead you if you forget that events and pageviews aren’t the same unit. Umami counts events, Plausible counts pageviews, Simple Analytics counts visits. Comparing numbers across tools is how founders convince themselves a migration “lost” half their traffic when nothing changed.
Key Takeaways
- Umami is the only one of the three with an MIT license, which matters if you ever want to build on it commercially.
- Plausible has the lowest entry price at $9/month and the best goal-tracking UI for a solo founder.
- Simple Analytics costs the most but requires the least attention; you’re paying for polish and support.
- At 300K+ monthly pageviews, Umami Pro’s flat $20 ceiling is the most predictable bill in the category.
- Self-hosting only saves money if your time costs nothing. Usually it doesn’t.
- Every one of them beats GA4 for a one-person company, mostly because you’ll actually look at it.
Start With the Free One
You can settle most of this decision in an afternoon. Sign up for Umami’s free Hobby tier, run it for two weeks, and see whether the dashboard gives you what you need. If you find yourself wanting goals and funnels, move to Plausible and accept the $9. Both take under five minutes to install, and you can run them side by side during a trial.
The tool matters less than the habit. Pick one, check it once a week, and write down what surprised you. That habit is worth more than any dashboard.
Written by the team at AI Cofounder Stack, a one-person operation. We recommend tools we’d use ourselves. Pricing was checked against vendor pages in October 2026; the vendors’ own pages have the final word.
