Umami Hosting

How Umami works

Umami adds a tracking script to a website and records visits in the hosted analytics instance. The dashboard groups activity into measures such as pageviews, visitors, referrers, locations, devices, campaigns, and real-time traffic. Each monitored site has its own identifier, allowing one installation to collect data for more than one property under the same account system.

Custom events extend the view beyond page loads. A site can record actions such as signups, downloads, form submissions, or button selections and attach contextual properties to those events. Reports can then examine channels, journeys, funnels, retention, segments, or other behaviour supported by the current application.

Key Umami features

The tracking approach is designed around privacy. Official documentation states that the standard tracker avoids cookies and does not collect personally identifiable information. Site owners still need to review local legal requirements, consent practices, and any custom event data they choose to send.

UTM campaigns, referrers, pages, devices, countries, events, and real-time activity provide a practical overview without requiring an advertising platform. Boards and reports help teams focus on selected metrics rather than opening every available dimension at once.

Umami vs Google Analytics

Umami is a self-hosted analytics application with a compact interface and a privacy-oriented data model. Google Analytics is a provider-managed measurement service connecting reporting with Google advertising products, attribution, audiences, and cross-platform analysis. Both report website activity, but they differ substantially in scope, data model, and operational control.

Google Analytics may suit teams needing deep Google advertising integration, advanced attribution, and the enterprise-oriented capabilities available through Analytics 360. Umami is attractive when straightforward traffic and event analysis, self-hosted data, and a smaller interface matter more than the breadth of a marketing platform.

Who uses Umami

Publishers monitor article traffic and referrals, product teams track signups or feature interactions, and small businesses review campaign visits without adopting a large marketing suite. Agencies can also keep several client sites in one installation when access and data governance are defined clearly.

Umami is not a substitute for every advertising, experimentation, customer-data, or product-analytics tool. Teams with complex attribution or identity requirements should compare those needs with the application’s current reports before migration.

Self-hosting Umami: requirements and cost

Resource use is mainly driven by tracked traffic, the number of sites, custom-event volume, query complexity, retention, and concurrent dashboard users. PostgreSQL stores websites, sessions, events, and reporting data, so the complete stack needs more headroom than the application-only RAM figure.

The software itself is free to run, and AvaHost maps Umami to Plan 2 at €5 for the application and PostgreSQL stack. One-click deployment provisions Umami and PostgreSQL, but the database remains unmanaged by AvaHost. The Umami service includes automatic application updates, scheduled backups, custom-domain support, and automated HTTPS. Sites with sustained traffic or detailed event capture should monitor database growth and upgrade before reporting becomes slow.