Umami is one of the nicest open-source analytics tools around: MIT-licensed, genuinely free to self-host, cookieless and fast. If you are a developer who enjoys owning your stack, it deserves the praise it gets. The honest difference is everything around the software - the Node and Postgres deployment you now operate, and a dashboard that is minimal by design. Here is the trade-off, laid out fairly.
Not the licence - the operations and the gaps.
Umami is a Node.js app on a PostgreSQL database. Someone has to provision it, keep Node and the OS patched, watch the logs and apply Umami's own updates - including the bigger version jumps. That someone is you.
Postgres grows with every event. Backups, restores, disk space and query performance on busy sites are all your problem to solve - the part of analytics nobody actually wants to do at 11pm.
Umami pitches itself as a simple alternative to Google Analytics, and it is. That simplicity is great - until the day you want per-visitor realtime, page speed data or search performance and find the dashboard deliberately stops short.
Umami tells you who came; it does not tell you why Google sent them, which keywords you rank for, who links to you or whether your domain is healthy. For that you bolt on Search Console and a rank tracker - more tabs, more tools.
LCP, INP and CLS are ranking signals, and Umami does not measure them. You will not see from its dashboard that a slow page is quietly costing you positions.
Umami Cloud is the managed escape hatch: a free Hobby tier with event and retention caps, and a Pro plan at $20/month for 1M events at the time of writing. Fair pricing - but it is the same minimal dashboard, now with a meter on it.
The managed alternative with depth - one dashboard instead of a stack to babysit.
No Node process, no Postgres, no backups, no upgrade notes. We run it in Germany under the GDPR; you read your stats.
Follow the road an individual visitor took through your site, page by page - stored first-party, EU-hosted and visible only to you.
Live per-visitor updates pushed to your dashboard the second a page loads - no refresh, with visitors counted offline after 2 minutes of silence.
Conversions by URL or event, multi-step funnels with drop-off, and Core Web Vitals measured from your real visitors - all in the base price.
Search Console keywords, backlinks and ranked keywords via DataForSEO, and domain health checks - next to your traffic, not in four other tools.
Solo is 1 site for €4/month, Studio 5 sites for €15, Agency 25 sites for €50 - yearly pays for 10 months, prices excl. VAT, 14-day trial. See pricing.
| Umami | Corbacount | |
|---|---|---|
| Open source / self-hostable | Yes - MIT licence, free forever | No - managed only |
| Maintenance required | Node + Postgres to run, update, back up, scale | None - fully managed |
| Hosted option | Umami Cloud: free Hobby tier (capped), Pro $20/month for 1M events | From €4/month, all features on every tier |
| Tracker script | Tiny - genuinely lightweight | 2.2 KB gzipped (7.3 KB raw), async, never blocks the page |
| Cookies | None - cookieless by design | One first-party _cc_vid cookie, nothing third-party |
| Events, goals & funnels | Yes | Yes, included |
| Individual visitor paths | Sessions and journey reports | Yes - full per-visitor path, first-party and private |
| Realtime view | Yes | Yes, pushed live per visitor (2-min presence) |
| Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS) | No | Built-in, from real visitors |
| SEO keywords & backlinks | No | Rankings, backlinks, domain health + GSC |
| Who runs the database | You (or Umami Cloud) | We do - pre-aggregated nightly, fast at any size |
| Ask your own AI questions (MCP) | No | Yes, via the MCP server |
| Price for one site | Self-hosted: free + server + your time; Cloud Hobby free with caps | €4/month, flat |
Last checked: June 2026. Umami details and Cloud pricing as published at the time of writing - check umami.is for their current offer. We aim to keep this fair; tell us if something is outdated. Comparing more tools? See the full comparison, Corbacount vs Matomo and Corbacount vs Fathom.
When you are a developer who wants full control, already runs infrastructure, and is happy operating a Node + Postgres stack - or when the budget is strictly zero. If that is your situation, self-hosted Umami is a legitimate answer and we will happily say so.
Cookieless is a real advantage and we will not talk it down. The trade-off is accuracy: without any identifier, returning visitors and multi-day journeys get fuzzy. We use one first-party _cc_vid cookie on your own domain - no third parties, EU-stored, visible only to you - because reliable paths and return-visit data are core to what we do. It is a trade, and we think a fair one.
No. Every tier includes paid external SEO data (rankings, backlinks, domain health), so a free plan would mean cutting features or inventing limits. Instead you get a 14-day full-access trial and a Solo plan at €4/month - details on the pricing page.
Yes - both trackers are one snippet, so run them side by side. Add ours next to Umami's (see the install guide), compare the numbers for a few weeks, then switch off the one you no longer need. Coming from a heavier tool instead? See Corbacount vs Matomo.
Get on the waitlist for early access and locked-in pricing.
