Alternatives · 2026
Ranked, scored and explained. What each one does better, what you give up, and when staying put is the right call.
Umami is free and open source, so people rarely leave it for price. They leave when a site grows past what it tells them. Segmentation is thinner than Plausible's, funnel analysis is competent rather than rich, bot filtering is less aggressive than the tools that advertise it, so raw counts deserve more scepticism, and session replay and heatmaps only appear on its two-hundred-dollar Business tier.
The other reason is operational. Self-hosting is light, but it is not nothing: you still own backups, upgrades and uptime.
When to stay put. Keep Umami if the site is personal, a side project or documentation, or if data ownership under an open licence is the point. Its hosted free tier at 100,000 events a month with no badge is the best free offer in the cookieless category, and self-hosting it is genuinely an afternoon rather than a project.
| Tool | From | Free tier | Cookies | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plausible Analytics | £9 per month | No, but the community edition is free to self-host | None, so no consent banner | 8.0 |
| Absolutely Analytics | $9 per month | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | None, so no consent banner | 8.9 |
| Pirsch Analytics | $6 per month | No. A 30-day trial, no card required | None, so no consent banner | 7.5 |
| Matomo | Free self-hosted; cloud from €22 | Yes, the entire on-premise product | Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured | 7.0 |
| Swetrix | Free self-hosted; hosted tiers are paid | Free self-hosting, plus a hosted trial | None | 7.1 |
| GoatCounter | Free for non-commercial use | Yes, free hosted for non-commercial sites | None | 6.9 |
The upgrade on depth and polish. Saved and shared segments, automatic scroll-depth tracking, Search Console integration, AI traffic reporting, and funnels on its Business tier. Also open source, and self-hostable if that was why you chose Umami.
From £9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The answer if you wanted heatmaps without the $200 tier. Click, scroll and attention maps from $14, masked session replay as an add-on, and bot filtering that runs before the meter rather than after it.
From $9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The answer if price is still the constraint. Six dollars for 10,000 pageviews with fifty sites, unlimited members and unlimited retention, plus funnels and A/B testing at twelve.
From $6 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
The answer if you want the full open-source ceiling. Everything Umami does plus funnels, flows, A/B testing, attribution, heatmaps and recordings, free to self-host on PHP and MySQL.
From Free self-hosted; cloud from €22. Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured. Full review →
The answer if you want the same open-source spirit with more in the box: funnels, user flows, session recording and error monitoring, self-hostable on ClickHouse and Postgres.
From Free self-hosted; hosted tiers are paid. None. Full review →
The answer if Umami was already more than you needed. Smaller, simpler, free for non-commercial use, a single Go binary to self-host, and it works from server logs or a pixel with no JavaScript at all.
From Free for non-commercial use. None. Full review →
For a hosted free tier, not really: 100,000 events a month with no badge is the most generous in the cookieless category. GoatCounter is free for non-commercial use and simpler. Matomo self-hosted is free and far more capable, at a much higher operational cost.
Chiefly bot filtering. Umami filters less aggressively than tools that make a feature of it, so its raw counts can include automated traffic that others exclude. Absolutely Analytics filters bots and AI crawlers before counting, and Plausible filters datacentre traffic and referrer spam by default.
GoatCounter, which is a single Go binary. Umami is next and is already easy. Swetrix needs ClickHouse and Postgres, and Matomo needs PHP, MySQL and archiving configuration, which is the heaviest of the four.
Umami gates heatmaps and replay behind its Business tier. Absolutely Analytics includes click, scroll and attention maps from $14. Microsoft Clarity is free at any volume but sets cookies and needs a consent banner. Matomo includes heatmaps, with small allowances on Cloud.
These are desk reviews and the ordering reflects my own weighted scoring, which is published in full. There are no affiliate links on this page and no vendor has paid to appear on it. Read the full Umami review, or send me a correction.