Google Analytics vs Umami vs Plausible vs Fathom

Every web analytics tool answers the same two questions: how many people read this, and where did they come from? Where they differ is in how deep they go, what they cost, where your data lives, and whether you need a cookie banner.

I've used most of these at some point. I’ve had Google Analytics (GA) on this blog from the start, tried self-hosting Plausible on DigitalOcean, and added Umami alongside GA, which I ran myself on Railway for a long time. Below is how the four best-known options compare today, and my choice for a new blog or small site.

Google Analytics vs Umami vs Plausible vs Fathom at a Glance

Google Analytics 4 is Free, but Comes with a Consent Banner

Google Analytics costs nothing and does more than the other three combined. It has segments, audiences and attribution models, and it connects directly to Google Ads and Search Console. If your site runs on ads, it's hard to replace.

The trade-off is cookies. GA4 sets them, so visitors in the EU and UK have to agree first. Anyone who declines or ignores the banner either disappears from your reports or gets estimated by Google's Consent Mode instead of counted. Technical audiences may also run ad blockers that stop Google's script from loading, so on a developer blog the traffic numbers may underreport the actual volumes. On the free tier, event-level data used in Explorations is kept for 2 months by default and 14 months at most.

Umami is What I Use, and the Easiest to Self-Host

I moved to Umami because it was light. It's one Node.js service and a Postgres database, with a small tracking script and a dashboard that shows what I need on one screen. I self-hosted it on Railway for a long time, well before Umami launched its cloud version, and my Umami on Railway guide covers that setup.

These days I'm on Umami Cloud's free Hobby plan, which covers 100,000 events a month on one website and keeps 6 months of history. Of the three cookieless cloud services here, it's the only one with a permanent free plan. If I outgrow it, I'll either upgrade to Pro, at $20 a month for a million events, 20 websites and 2 years of history, or go back to self-hosting. That's a decision for another day.

Plausible Has a Simple Dashboard and the Cheapest Paid Plan

Plausible puts everything on one page, and at low traffic it's the cheapest paid option: $9 a month for up to 10,000 pageviews on the Starter plan, after a 30-day free trial. There's no free plan, and funnels and the Stats API need the $19 Business plan.

Self-hosting is free with Plausible Community Edition, but it's heavier than Umami. It needs ClickHouse as well as Postgres, and a CPU with SSE 4.2 or NEON support. I ran it on a 2 GB Droplet, which is still the minimum memory Plausible recommends. My Plausible on DigitalOcean guide walks through the setup, and new DigitalOcean accounts get sign-up credit to try it.

Fathom is Polished and Fully Managed, but Not Self-Hostable

Fathom is cookieless, closed source and cloud-only. Plans start at $15 a month for up to 100,000 pageviews and include up to 50 sites, so it costs more than Plausible at very low traffic. There's no free plan.

Fathom Lite, the original open-source version, is still on GitHub under the MIT licence, and I keep a Railway template for Fathom Lite for anyone already running it. I wouldn't start a new site on it, though. It only gets maintenance fixes, it has the old dashboard, and unlike today's Fathom it sets cookies.

Your Platform May Already Include Analytics

Check what you already have before adding anything. Ghost 6 added cookie-free, first-party web analytics built on Tinybird, included on Ghost(Pro) from the Publisher plan up. Cloudflare Web Analytics is free and cookieless if your site already sits behind Cloudflare. Both answer "what did people read?" well. You'll want a dedicated tool once you need custom events, goals, several sites in one dashboard, or data you can export.

Where Amplitude, Mixpanel and PostHog Fit

Amplitude, Mixpanel and PostHog come up in every analytics discussion, but they solve a different problem. They're product analytics tools: they follow individual signed-in users through an app, with cohorts, funnels and experiments built around those users. All three have free tiers, and PostHog is open source. For a SaaS product they make sense. For a blog or simple website, they're overkill.

Newer Open-Source Alternatives

Rybbit is less than two years old and already has over 13,000 GitHub stars. It sits between a page counter and a product analytics tool, with session replay, user journeys, error tracking and Core Web Vitals alongside the usual reports. It's AGPL-licensed, cloud plans start at $19 a month, and self-hosting means running ClickHouse, Postgres, Redis and Caddy together.

Runlight is much newer, launched in October 2026. It's MIT-licensed and cookieless, and you can run it as a library inside your existing app or as a standalone server. It also counts AI agents such as ChatGPT and Claude when they read your pages, and can import your history from Umami. It's early, with a single maintainer, so I'd try it on a side project first. My Runlight template for Railway deploys it in one click, and its README covers the settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do privacy-friendly analytics tools need a cookie banner? Umami, Plausible and Fathom don't set cookies or store personal data, so they don't need a consent banner for analytics under GDPR. If you send custom events that include personal data, that changes, so check with a legal adviser.

Is self-hosting analytics cheaper than a cloud plan? At low traffic, not by much. A small server costs about the same as Plausible's $9 plan, and you take on updates and backups. Self-hosting pays off when you track many sites or a lot of traffic, or when you want the data on your own infrastructure.

Can I move from Google Analytics without losing my history? Plausible has a built-in Google Analytics importer, so your history comes with you. Ghost's built-in analytics can't import history from other tools.

Which option keeps my data most private? Self-hosting. Umami and Plausible Community Edition both run on your own server, so the data never leaves your control.

If you want to run Umami yourself, my Umami on Railway guide is the place to start.