Plausible vs Umami vs Google Analytics: Privacy-Friendly Web Analytics for a Small Business
Google Analytics is free and the default most small-business sites end up on — but it also means a cookie-consent banner, a data-processing agreement with Google, and a dashboard built for marketing teams, not “how many people read my post.” Plausible and Umami are the two privacy-first alternatives that come up most, and they split on a question that matters for a homelab-minded reader: do you self-host, or pay for hosted?
Search intent
Someone searching “Plausible vs Umami vs Google Analytics” runs a small-business or side-project site and wants basic traffic numbers without Google’s cookie-consent and data-sharing baggage — and is deciding whether to pay for a hosted privacy-friendly tool or self-host one for free.
Quick take
- Want a paid, fully-managed privacy-friendly tool with no server to run: Plausible Cloud (from $9/month)
- Want the same idea but free, if you’re willing to self-host it yourself: Umami (self-hosted, free, MIT license) or Plausible Community Edition (self-hosted, free, AGPLv3)
- Already using Google Analytics and don’t want to change: it’s free and fine for basic traffic numbers, but budget time for cookie-consent/GDPR handling
The three options
Plausible is a paid-first product with an open-source self-hosted option. The hosted Cloud service starts at Starter, $9/month (up to 10k monthly pageviews, 1 site, 3 years of data retention), Growth, $14/month (up to 3 sites, 3 team members), and Business, $19/month (up to 10 sites, 10 team members, 5 years of retention, plus funnels, custom properties, and ecommerce revenue tracking) — all with a 30-day free trial and no credit card required to start. Plausible Community Edition (CE) is a genuinely free, self-hosted version under the AGPLv3 license, but it drops several Cloud-only features: no funnels/user-journey analysis, no ecommerce tracking, only basic (not the Cloud’s expanded ~32,000-range) bot filtering, community support only, and twice-yearly releases instead of continuous updates.
Umami is free-first, MIT-licensed, and fully open source either way you run it. Self-hosted Umami is completely free with no feature gate — the same tool the paid Cloud tier runs. Umami Cloud offers a genuinely free-forever Hobby tier (100,000 events/month, 3 websites, 6 months of retention) for people who’d rather not manage a server, and a Pro tier at $20/month (1 million events/month, unlimited websites, 5 years of retention, email support) for higher-traffic sites, with overage billed at $0.00002/event beyond plan limits.
Google Analytics (GA4) is free for the traffic volumes almost any small-business or homelab-adjacent site will see, with paid Analytics 360 existing only for enterprise-scale, custom-quoted usage most readers of this site will never need. The trade is privacy posture, not cost: GA4 relies on cookies and shares data into Google’s ad ecosystem, which in most jurisdictions triggers a cookie-consent banner requirement and a data-processing agreement — overhead Plausible and Umami are built to avoid by design (no cookies, no cross-site tracking).
Which one should you actually pick?
- Want to self-host for free and don’t mind running a small Docker container: Umami — no feature gate between free self-hosted and paid Cloud, MIT-licensed. A mini PC or small VPS running it alongside other Docker Compose stacks is plenty.
- Want a paid, zero-maintenance privacy-friendly tool and don’t want to run infrastructure: Plausible Cloud, starting at $9/month.
- Want the open-source self-hosted route but prefer Plausible’s dashboard specifically: Plausible CE — free, but expect fewer features than Umami’s self-hosted build offers at the same price point (zero).
- Site traffic is tiny and cookie-consent overhead isn’t a concern yet: Google Analytics remains free and the path of least resistance — revisit once GDPR/consent handling becomes a real chore.
- Already de-Googling other tools — see Nextcloud vs Google Workspace if analytics is one piece of a broader move off Google’s ecosystem.
Plausible Cloud / hosted analytics affiliate placeholder — swap for a real referral link once a program is confirmed.
Bottom line
Umami is the strongest pick if you’re comfortable self-hosting — it’s free either way you run it, with no feature gap. Plausible is the better call if you’d rather pay a small monthly fee and skip server maintenance entirely. Google Analytics stays free and adequate for low-traffic sites, but comes with cookie-consent overhead the other two are specifically designed to avoid.