Umami vs Plausible: which one should I run myself?

Kevin Renskers had paid for Plausible's cloud since July 2020. In February 2026 he moved his sites to Plausible Community Edition (CE) on his own server. One of them normally gets about 200 unique visitors a day, and after the move the dashboard showed more than 5,000 on some days. He put the jump down to bots. The next day he wrote that he'd moved all his sites to Umami, and the inflated numbers came with him.

Umami and Plausible CE side by side

From each project's docs, pricing pages, GitHub repositories and release notes, checked in October 2026. If you'd rather pay for the cloud, Plausible's Starter plan lists $9 a month for up to 10k monthly pageviews. Our guide to Plausible pricing at your traffic, next to Fathom and Umami Cloud covers the higher tiers.

Bots inflate the counts in both tools

Renskers' jump from 200 to 5,000 isn't something either tool solves on its own. Self-hosted Plausible filters on user agents and referrer spam, while Plausible's cloud also blocks about 32,000 data center IP ranges. Umami relies on the isbot library, which checks the browser's user-agent string, and Renskers found it caught the most obvious crawlers and let through anything posing as a regular browser.

What worked for him was a set of Cloudflare rules, all available on Cloudflare's free plan, and they block known bots, empty user agents and traffic from data center networks before it reaches the analytics endpoints. His count fell from 2,000 to 5,000 visitors a day to about 500. The data center rule only sees the analytics requests because he serves Umami's script and API through his site's own domain. Without Cloudflare, self-hosted Umami's IGNORE_IP setting takes a comma-separated list of IP addresses and CIDR ranges to leave out of your stats, so you can add data center ranges yourself.

What each one puts on your server

Umami's official Compose file runs two containers, the app and PostgreSQL 15. Since version 3, PostgreSQL's the only database Umami's docs support, and the install docs ask for PostgreSQL 12.14 or newer. They still list Node.js 18.18, but Umami's 3.1.0 release notes raised the minimum to Node.js 22 because of Prisma 7, and its Docker image runs Node.js 22 too. Umami doesn't publish a memory or CPU minimum.

Plausible CE's Compose file runs three: the Plausible app, PostgreSQL 16 and ClickHouse 24.12, and ClickHouse is why CE needs a processor with SSE 4.2 or NEON instructions. Plausible recommends at least 2 GB of RAM so the three don't crash when memory runs out, and the Compose file already mounts ClickHouse settings meant for small machines. ClickHouse's own usage recommendations say it can run on as little as 2 GB, though a setup that small needs extra tuning and can only ingest at a low rate.

We ran both on Oct 21, 2026, each from its own Compose file, on our test machine with 2 vCPU and 4 GB (arm64), not a DreamHost server. That was Umami 3.4.0 with PostgreSQL 15, and Plausible CE v3.2.1 with PostgreSQL 16 and ClickHouse 24.12.

We also sent Umami 30,000 test pageviews in under three minutes. It counted every one, memory sat at 306 MiB afterward, and the database grew about 1 KB per pageview. We didn't load-test Plausible, because that needs an account and a site made through its web sign-up. So its 646 MiB is an idle figure. It doesn't contradict Plausible's 2 GB recommendation, which covers running with data and queries. Each tool ran once, with no repeats.

ClickHouse earns its memory at volume. It's built for fast analytics queries, and Aaron Becker's comparison expects it to beat PostgreSQL at scale, though with considerably more RAM.

What the self-hosted versions leave out

Plausible keeps several features for its cloud and lists them itself. CE has no marketing funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO or sites API, and there's no paid support for it, only the community.

Umami's pricing FAQ names two cloud-only features, email reports and the streaming API. Everything else on Umami's report list, from funnels, journeys and revenue to session replays and heatmaps, runs on your own server, though Umami Cloud sells replays and heatmaps only from its Business plan up.

Plausible still does a few things Umami doesn't:

• CE pulls search terms from Google Search Console and can import your GA4 history. Both need a Google OAuth app that you set up yourself in your Google account. There's no Search Console link in any Umami release. On October 14, 2026, Umami's maintainer closed a community pull request for one and said Search Console support had landed in Umami's development code as a Cloud integration. As written, that code turns the page off on self-hosted servers.
• CE has reported scroll depth as its own metric since version 3.0.0, which also added teams, engagement time and segments.

Renskers chose Umami and still calls Plausible's dashboard cleaner and more modern. If neither tool suits you, our list of open-source tools you can run yourself also covers Matomo.

Updates and backups

Plausible lists installation, upgrades, capacity, uptime and backup as the self-hoster's job. Umami's pricing FAQ says its cloud handles infrastructure, updates, and maintenance for you, so on your own server that work is yours too.

CE is a long-term release that comes out twice a year, and its latest is v3.2.1 from May 15, 2026. CE doesn't backport fixes, so upgrading is the only way to get them, and a major upgrade can come with data migrations and a new ClickHouse image.

Umami ships more often: it put out five releases between April 16 and September 17, 2026, from 3.1.0 to 3.4.0. A faster pace also means more updates to apply.

Backups are simpler on Umami, where all of its data sits in one PostgreSQL database, and a standard database dump covers it. CE has two databases to back up, PostgreSQL and ClickHouse. A Hacker News user who left Plausible in 2022 didn't want ClickHouse's "admin overhead" on top: With Umami I only need Postgres.

The license question

Umami is MIT-licensed. Plausible CE is AGPLv3, and the AGPL's network clause applies when you modify the program: people using your changed version over a network must be offered its source code. If you run CE unchanged for your own sites, the license text doesn't ask that of you, though we're reading the text here and aren't giving legal advice. Plausible releases the tracker script that goes on your pages under MIT, to avoid issues with AGPL virality.

Which one to run

Plausible isn't in the app library on DreamHost's VPS page, so you'd install CE yourself. Start with Plausible's install guide.

If you pick Umami

A DreamHost VPS with Umami comes with Umami, PostgreSQL 15 and Caddy 2 on Debian 13, and Caddy handles HTTPS with a Let's Encrypt certificate it requests for the server's IP address at first boot. The image creates your admin login at first boot. You'll read your login over SSH.

The image ships Umami 3.2.0, which isn't the newest, and running umami-update moves you to the current release (3.4.0, out September 17). The command warns that a database migration can be one-way, so run umami-backup first. That backup is a database dump on the same disk, and it won't leave the server unless you copy it off. DreamHost support is available 24/7 for the hardware, network and connectivity. Umami, the operating system and the backups are yours.

Umami doesn't publish a minimum size, so our picks are guidance: Stack 4, the smallest plan the Umami image comes on, for a few sites, and Stack 8, the plan DreamHost labels for apps running in production, for a busy one. Neither Umami nor DreamHost publishes a traffic level where you'd need to move up. The database lives on the server's root disk, so check how fast it grows over the first month, especially with replays turned on, which our test didn't record.

Umami and Plausible FAQs