Self-hosted analytics in 2026: Umami vs Plausible vs GA4

Three tools, three business models

The comparison that matters in 2026 is not "which dashboard is prettier." It is three different business models with three different answers to the same questions: where does the data live, who pays, and what do you have to give up.

• Umami is open-source web and product analytics. You can self-host it for free or pay for Umami Cloud, the managed service. The company publishes 30M+ downloads, 39K+ GitHub stars and 400+ contributors for the project.
• Plausible runs the same code two ways, as the vendor describes it: Plausible Community Edition (CE), the free, self-hosted, AGPLv3-licensed release, and Plausible Cloud, the paid managed service whose subscriptions fund development. Plausible publishes 21k paying subscribers and 313B tracked pageviews.
• Google Analytics 4 is, in Google's own words, offered "free of charge" in its standard tier. It is proprietary, cloud-only, and its economics come from the wider Google advertising ecosystem rather than from an analytics subscription.

"Free" is doing different work in each case. Umami and Plausible charge nothing for the software and let you supply the server; their clouds are the paid convenience tier. GA4 charges nothing for the service and asks instead for cookies, identifiers and consent machinery. The rest of this guide prices that trade.

What each one measures

Umami positions itself as one platform for acquisition, behavior, conversion, retention and revenue. Its published feature set includes channels, referrers and campaign attribution; custom events such as clicks, form submissions and downloads; a Journey report of common page and event sequences; funnels, goals and retention cohorts; revenue tied to events; and heatmaps and session replays at the top of its range. It also ships an official MCP server so AI assistants can query your analytics — available, per Umami, on Cloud Pro plans and above and on self-hosted Umami v3.4 or later.

Plausible deliberately measures less, on one page. Its published features include the core metrics (pageviews, visitors, bounce rate, visit time), automatic scroll-depth tracking, traffic from AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude, Search Console integration for organic queries, UTM campaign tracking, codeless goals, revenue tracking, funnels and user journeys, a real-time view, and built-in bot filtering. There is no session replay or heatmap in anything Plausible publishes.

GA4 models everything as events. Google's documentation divides them into automatically collected events, enhanced-measurement events, recommended events and custom events, batched in groups of up to 20 per hit, with any event markable as a "key event" for conversion measurement. Its published pitch adds cross-device, cross-platform lifecycle measurement, machine-learning insights and attribution, and integrations with Google Ads, Search Ads 360, Display & Video 360, Google Cloud and Search Console. That integration surface is the thing neither open-source project replicates.

Data ownership and retention

Self-hosting is the strongest form of ownership on this list: the database is literally yours. Umami self-hosts on your own Node.js server and PostgreSQL database; Plausible CE runs on your own infrastructure with Postgres and ClickHouse. Plausible's own comparison page notes CE can be hosted "on any server in any country that you wish" — including, it says pointedly, providers that are not GDPR compliant. The flip side is also documented there: with CE you are responsible for installation, maintenance, upgrades, capacity, uptime, backup and security.

On the managed tiers, the published positions differ. Plausible Cloud processes all visitor data exclusively on EU-owned infrastructure, on a server in Germany; data never leaves the EU. Umami Cloud states its servers are in the US and EU, and its FAQ promises full data export via API or dashboard with "no vendor lock-in." Google documents that under GDPR it acts as data processor while customers remain data controllers with rights over collection, access, retention and deletion.

Retention is where GA4's free tier shows its ceiling. Google's published options for standard properties are 2 or 14 months for user-level data, and 2, 14, 26, 38 or 50 months for other event data — but the 26/38/50-month choices are Google Analytics 360 only. Google-signals data is capped at 26 months regardless of settings, and a full raw-event export to BigQuery is documented as a 360 feature. Standard-tier history beyond retention survives only in aggregated reports. Umami Cloud publishes retention of 6 months (Hobby), 2 years (Pro) and 5 years (Business); Plausible Cloud publishes 3 years on Starter and Growth, 5 years on Business and 5+ on Enterprise. Self-hosted instances of either keep data as long as you keep the database.

Cookies and consent posture

This is the sharpest documented divide. Both open-source vendors claim a banner-free posture as a core feature:

• Umami states it works without cookies, never collects personal data, does not track users across websites, and that this "supports your GDPR, CCPA, and PECR obligations" with no cookie consent banner needed.
• Plausible states it uses no cookies, no persistent identifiers and no cross-site or cross-device tracking, and that no cookie banner is required.

GA4, per Google's own privacy documentation, mainly uses first-party cookies and a client identifier to report on user interactions. Google says IP addresses are used to secure the service and infer geography but are not logged or stored during data collection. Where advertising features are enabled, Google's EU User Consent policy requires customers to obtain consent for cookies where legally required. Google also publishes Consent Mode (v2), which lets a site set defaults — ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data and ad_personalization — as denied, then update them as visitors make choices, in a "basic" or "advanced" implementation.

Two honest caveats. First, "no banner required" is a vendor claim about product design, not legal advice; whether a given site needs consent for a given analytics tool depends on jurisdiction and how the tool is deployed Not verified. Second, consent machinery has a data cost that Plausible's migration guide states plainly: GA4 models missing data from visitors who decline consent, while cookieless tools count those visitors directly — one reason Plausible says a 10–20% traffic difference between the two is normal.

The real cost of hosting

Self-hosting is free in license fees and paid in operations. Umami's documented requirements are modest: Node.js 18.18 or newer and PostgreSQL 12.14 or newer, installed from source, via Docker Compose, from a prebuilt Docker image, or on Kubernetes with a third-party Helm chart. Plausible CE's official repository requires Docker and Docker Compose, a CPU supporting SSE 4.2 or NEON (for ClickHouse), and recommends at least 2 GB of RAM. Neither vendor publishes a dollar figure for the server itself; actual VPS costs vary by provider Not verified.

The managed tiers publish their prices. Plausible Cloud scales by monthly pageviews: at up to 10k pageviews, Starter is $9/month, Growth $14 and Business $19; at up to 1M pageviews the same tiers run $69, $104 and $139; the published ladder tops out at 10M pageviews for $169/$254/$339, with yearly billing giving two months free. Umami Cloud meters events instead (pageviews plus custom events and event properties): Hobby is $0 with 100K events/month and one website, Pro is $20 with 1M events included and overage at $0.00003 per event, Business is $200 with 10M events, session replays, heatmaps and white-labeling, and Enterprise is custom. GA4 standard is free; GA 360 is the paid tier, and Google does not publish its price on the pages we read.

One documented catch on the free path: Plausible CE withholds premium features — marketing funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the sites API are cloud-only — ships long-term releases twice per year instead of weekly updates, and gets community support only. Umami's FAQ lists a shorter cloud-only gap (email reports and the streaming API), so on published information self-hosted Umami keeps more of the paid product's feature set than self-hosted Plausible does. And GA4's "free" carries an unbilled line item: someone has to implement and maintain Consent Mode and a consent management platform, which is engineering time rather than server time.

Migration effort, as documented

Plausible is the only vendor of the three that publishes a dedicated GA4-migration guide. It documents importing historical GA4 data with deduplication handled so there are "no gaps or double-counting issues," running Plausible alongside GA4 while teams learn the new dashboard (adding the script next to the GA4 snippet has, it says, no meaningful page-speed impact), and mapping goals, UTM campaigns and key events across. Its feature-reference table frames the trade directly: GA4 is built for user profiling and ad attribution, and most of its complexity exists to support that.

Umami's pricing page shows data import as a feature of paid Cloud tiers and data export on all tiers, and its FAQ repeats the no-lock-in promise, but Umami does not publish a GA4 import guide on the pages we read. Mechanically, moving to either open-source tool is a script-tag swap plus rebuilding goals and events; the documented risk is not the install but the numbers — Plausible warns a 10–20% discrepancy versus GA4 is normal because GA4 models consent-declined visitors and includes bot traffic Plausible filters. The reverse migration (open-source back to GA4) has no vendor-published data-import path; GA4's documented ingestion is its tag, and historical raw data leaves Google's platform in full only via the 360-tier BigQuery export.

Decision table by use case

What we could not verify

• GA 360 pricing. Google does not publish 360 prices on the pages we read; only its existence and its higher retention and BigQuery export limits are documented.
• Legal banner requirements by jurisdiction. Vendor claims ("no banner needed") describe product design; whether consent is legally required for a specific deployment varies by country and is not something any of the three vendors' pages settles.
• Dollar cost of self-hosting. Neither Umami nor Plausible publishes a recommended server price; VPS costs vary widely.
• Umami self-hosted feature parity in detail. Beyond the FAQ's cloud-only list (email reports, streaming API), Umami does not publish an exhaustive self-hosted vs Cloud feature matrix on the pages we read.

Plans, limits and documented requirements change. Everything above reflects what Umami, Plausible and Google published on the pages listed below as of 19 October 2026; where a claim could not be traced to a primary source, it is marked unverified rather than presented as fact.