Plausible vs Umami

What the numbers say

Both ladders above are sold by traffic, and the two vendors count different things. Plausible adds pageviews and custom events together across every site in a team, and outbound clicks, file downloads, form submissions and 404 pages turn into custom events the moment you switch those measurements on. Umami counts a pageview as one event, a custom event as one more, and every stored event property as another. A site of plain pages sits low on both ladders; one that saves several properties with every event climbs Umami’s faster.

What happens above the line no price row can show. Umami bills extra events at a per-event rate and states that collection is not interrupted. Plausible asks for nothing after one month over the limit; after two in a row it asks for an upgrade, and without one the dashboards lock while collection continues, until usage drops back or you move up a tier.

Retention in the table comes from each vendor’s cheapest paid plan, which hides the range on both sides: Umami’s free Hobby plan holds six months for one website, Pro two years and Business five, while Plausible’s entry plan holds three years and Business five. Storage is the other asymmetry: Umami asks you to pick a data region during account setup and runs servers in the US and the EU, while Plausible states that it processes on EU infrastructure, with site data in Germany.

Who picks which

Plausible arrives with more of the connections a marketing site already uses: an official WordPress plugin, a Google Search Console integration, email and Slack reports, and setup guides for the shop platforms and site builders the feature table leaves as not confirmed for Umami. Funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue, custom properties and the Stats API belong to its Business plan. Running it yourself means Docker Compose with PostgreSQL and ClickHouse, a release twice a year and basic bot filtering.

Umami puts its reports on every cloud plan, including the free one: funnel, retention, user journey, goals, revenue, attribution and UTM. Data import, API access and email reports start with Pro; session replays, heatmaps and white-labeling with Business. Self-hosting asks for Node.js 18.18 or newer with PostgreSQL 12.14 or newer, or the Docker image. Where the table reads no, plan around it: no vendor WordPress plugin, no Search Console connector, no Slack or webhook alerts.

Questions and answers

Can I move my Plausible data into Umami?

Not through a documented importer. Umami Cloud names two sources, a PostgreSQL export from a self-hosted Umami and a CSV file, and says its own team runs imports for Pro customers. Plausible is not named, so ask whether a CSV you prepare from its export fits that path; that export is a ZIP of CSV files, and several other tools here read it directly.

One of them is free at this volume. What does the free plan cover?

One website, six months of history and community support, with the report set listed on every Umami plan. Plausible has no free plan: it runs a 30-day trial with Business features and limits, after which you pick a tier.

Can I self-host either one, and what do I give up?

Yes to both, with different stacks and different gaps. Plausible Community Edition ships without funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API, and updates twice a year. Self-hosted Umami runs the same reports as the cloud, without the email reports and streaming API the vendor keeps there. The open source and self-hosted list shows the rest of the field.