Umami
Simple, privacy friendly website analytics you host yourself
Umami counts visits, pages, referrers and devices on your websites without cookies or personal data, from a small script. It is MIT licensed and runs as one app plus a database.
Best for when
- you want simple traffic numbers for your sites without Google Analytics
- you want analytics without cookies
- you run several small sites and want them in one dashboard
Watch out for
- ad blockers hide part of your traffic, so the numbers are a floor
- the tracker must be public, so the instance is internet facing
- it is deliberately simple, so funnels and deep product analysis are limited
The numbers you actually look at
Most people with a portfolio or a small product only check a handful of things: how many visitors, which pages, where they came from. Umami shows that on one clean dashboard, and adds custom events when you need to track a button.
It does not use cookies or store personal data, which keeps the script light and, for many sites, removes the need for a consent banner. Check your own legal situation before relying on that.
Running it
It needs the app and PostgreSQL, and it is light on both RAM and CPU for personal traffic. The tracking script must be reachable from the internet, so this is one of the apps you publish, for example through a tunnel.
Ad blockers block many analytics scripts, so expect undercounting. Back up the database if the history matters to you, and keep the dashboard login strong since the app is public.
