When to pick which

Both ship the same core promise — pageviews + sources + UTM tracking, no cookies, no banner — but they diverge sharply on the ops cost. Umami runs on a single Postgres (or MySQL) and a Next.js process; a $5 VPS handles it comfortably and you can plausibly forget about it for months. Plausible's stack is heavier — Elixir app + Postgres + ClickHouse — and that ClickHouse is the part that rules out the cheapest VPS tier; budget $10/mo and a small ops habit. Pick Umami when the bar is 'anything cheaper and lighter than Google Analytics' and the dashboard is the deliverable. Pick Plausible when you want goal funnels, the official Google Analytics importer (it can pull GA4 metadata), and the more polished public dashboards — the Plausible product team treats analytics as the company's whole surface, while Umami stays tightly scoped. Both have AGPL/MIT licenses friendly to embed-and-forget self-hosting; neither will cover deep cohort analysis, so if that's the requirement, you're shopping for PostHog instead.