Head to head
Umami vs Matomo
An afternoon to deploy, or everything in the box. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Umami
7.5/10
No. 4 of 30
Matomo
7.0/10
No. 8 of 30
The two serious open-source options, and the choice between them is almost entirely about operational appetite rather than features.
Umami is a small Node application over Postgres that deploys with Docker in an afternoon. Matomo is an eighteen-year-old PHP and MySQL platform that matches Google Analytics feature for feature and expects to be operated like a production service.
The verdict
It depends on whether you want analytics you can run or analytics that can answer anything.
Take Umami if the site is small to medium and you want ownership without drama. MIT licensed, about two kilobytes of script, cookieless, and genuinely pleasant to self-host: no archiving cron jobs, no performance cliff, a codebase small enough to read. Its hosted free tier gives 100,000 events a month with no badge, which is the best free offer in the cookieless category.
Take Matomo if you need the depth. Funnels, user flows, A/B testing, multi-channel attribution, heatmaps, session recording, a tag manager, media analytics and roll-up reporting across properties are all included, free, on your own hardware. Nothing else open source comes close.
The cost is the operating burden, and it is the real decision. Matomo's characteristic failure is quiet: archiving falls behind as the database grows, the dashboard goes stale, and nobody notices for months. Budget for that honestly or take Umami.
Side by side
| Umami | Matomo | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 7.5 / 10 | 7.0 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 4 of 30 | No. 8 of 30 |
| From | Free self-hosted and on cloud Hobby | Free self-hosted; cloud from €22 |
| What that buys | Cloud Hobby is free at 100,000 events a month; Pro is $20 for 1M events | On-premise is free; Matomo Cloud starts at €22 a month for 50,000 hits |
| Free tier | Yes, 100,000 events a month on hosted cloud, plus free self-hosting | Yes, the entire on-premise product |
| Cookies | None | Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured |
| Script size | About 2 KB | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | Your own servers, or hosted cloud | Your own servers, or EU cloud |
| Trading since | 2020 | 2007, as Piwik |
| Licence and cost | MIT, free self-hosted | GPL, free self-hosted |
| Stack | Node with Postgres or MySQL | PHP with MySQL |
| Deployment effort | Docker, an afternoon | A project, plus archiving configuration |
| Analytical depth | Competent: funnels, breakdowns, retention | Deep: flows, attribution, A/B testing, roll-ups |
| Heatmaps and recordings | Hosted Business tier only, $200/mo | Included |
| Hosted option | Free at 100k events/mo; Pro $20 | Cloud from €22/mo at 50k hits |
| Bot filtering | Present, less aggressive | More developed |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Umami | Matomo |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 7 | 8 |
| Privacy architecture | 9 | 8 |
| Value for money | 9 | 7 |
| Setup and time to data | 6 | 4 |
| Script weight | 9 | 3 |
| Analytical depth | 6 | 9 |
| Behaviour tooling | 4 | 7 |
| Data ownership | 10 | 10 |
| Accuracy | 6 | 7 |
| Vendor conduct | 7 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 7.5 | 7.0 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose Umami if
You want ownership without operating a production PHP application, or you want a genuinely usable free hosted tier.
Choose Matomo if
You need funnels, attribution, heatmaps and roll-up reporting, and you have someone to run it properly.
Common questions
Which is easier to self-host, Umami or Matomo?
Umami, by a wide margin. It is a Node application against Postgres or MySQL that deploys with Docker in an afternoon. Matomo needs PHP, MySQL and archiving jobs configured and monitored as data grows, and performance degrades noticeably if archiving is left alone.
Is Umami as capable as Matomo?
No, and it does not try to be. Matomo has funnels, user flows, A/B testing, multi-channel attribution, heatmaps, session recording and a tag manager. Umami covers traffic, events, basic funnels and retention, and reserves heatmaps and replay for its $200 hosted tier.
Which has a better free option?
Umami, for hosted: 100,000 events a month with no badge and no expiry. Matomo has no hosted free tier, but its self-hosted build is free and far more capable than Umami's if you can run it.
Do both work without cookies?
Umami is cookieless by design. Matomo can be configured to run without cookies and with IP anonymisation, which works but is configuration you must get right rather than a property of the product.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for Umami and Matomo, or tell me where I have got something wrong.