Umami is a popular open source analytics tool — lightweight, self-hostable, and privacy-friendly. sourcebeam offers a similar philosophy but as a fully managed service, with revenue tracking and AI capabilities that go beyond what Umami provides.
0
Servers to manage
<1 KB
Script size
Free
10K events/month
Umami is free — until you count your time. Self-hosting Umami means setting up a PostgreSQL or MySQL database, deploying a Node.js application, configuring reverse proxies, managing SSL certificates, running database migrations on updates, and monitoring uptime. For developers who enjoy infrastructure work, this is part of the fun. For teams that want analytics to just work so they can focus on building their product, it is an ongoing tax on engineering time. Every hour spent debugging a crashed Umami instance or optimizing slow database queries is an hour not spent on your actual business.
Umami Cloud exists, but it is limited. Umami offers a managed cloud product, but the free Hobby plan is capped at 10,000 events per month across only 3 websites, with 1 year of data retention. Their paid plans start at $20/month for 100,000 events. sourcebeam starts at just $5/month for 10,000 events, with up to 20 tracked sites and no artificial data retention cap. Pay-as-you-go pricing scales smoothly — no tiers to manage, no sudden jumps in cost.
Scaling a self-hosted instance is your problem. When your site gets featured on Hacker News or Product Hunt, your self-hosted Umami instance needs to handle the spike. That means database connection pooling, possibly read replicas, and enough server headroom to absorb sudden traffic. With sourcebeam, traffic spikes are handled automatically — you just pay for the extra events. No pager alerts, no scrambling to scale infrastructure at 2 AM.
Under 1 KB. No npm packages. No build step.
Revenue tracking with Stripe. Umami tracks pageviews, custom events, and referrers. sourcebeam does all of that plus automatic revenue attribution. Connect your Stripe account and every checkout is linked back to the visitor, session, and traffic source that drove it. You can answer questions like "How much revenue did organic search generate this month?" or "What is the average revenue per visitor from Twitter?" without any manual event setup or data pipeline.
AI-ready API for natural language queries. sourcebeam's read-only API is structured for LLM consumption. You can connect Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI assistant to your analytics and ask questions conversationally. "What are my top 5 landing pages by bounce rate?" "How does my weekend traffic compare to weekday traffic?" Umami has an API for programmatic access, but it was designed for dashboards and integrations — not for AI-driven analysis.
Visitor-level journey tracking. Umami provides aggregate analytics — total visitors, pageviews by URL, device breakdowns. sourcebeam goes further by tracking individual visitor journeys across multiple sessions. You can see the complete path a visitor takes from first discovery to conversion: which pages they visited, how many times they came back, what finally triggered their signup or purchase. All without cookies or personal data.
Conversion goals with attribution. Umami lets you track custom events, but sourcebeam adds structured conversion goals with automatic attribution. Define a goal (e.g., "user signs up" or "user reaches pricing page") and sourcebeam tracks conversion rates across traffic sources, landing pages, and campaigns. You can see which marketing channels actually drive conversions, not just traffic.
A smaller tracking script. Umami's script is around 2 KB gzipped — already very light. sourcebeam's is under 1 KB. Both are far lighter than Google Analytics, but for sites where every byte of JavaScript is scrutinized — progressive web apps, mobile-first experiences, or sites targeting users on slow connections — the difference matters.
Umami Cloud's free plan is capped at 3 websites with 1 year data retention. sourcebeam starts at $5/month with up to 20 tracked sites and no artificial retention cap.
| sourcebeam | Umami | |
|---|---|---|
| Fully managed (no self-hosting) | ||
| Revenue tracking (Stripe) | ||
| AI-ready API | ||
| Visitor journeys | ||
| Under 1KB script | ||
| Pay-as-you-go pricing | ||
| Cookie-free tracking | ||
| One-line setup | ||
| Real-time data | ||
| Conversion goals | ||
| Affordable entry ($5/mo) | ||
| Self-hosted option | ||
| Open source | ||
| Unlimited websites (self-hosted) | ||
| Team members (self-hosted) |
Umami's open source nature and self-hosting capability are real advantages for teams that want full control over their analytics infrastructure and data.
If you want to self-host your analytics on your own infrastructure and have full control over the code and data, Umami is an excellent choice. It is open source (MIT licensed), actively maintained, and has a strong community. For organizations with strict data residency requirements or developers who prefer to own every layer of their stack, self-hosted Umami is hard to beat.
If you also need unlimited websites and team members without additional cost, self-hosted Umami gives you that — your only limit is your server capacity. sourcebeam is the better fit when you want managed hosting, revenue insights, AI integration, and the simplicity of not maintaining another piece of infrastructure.
Starting at $5/month. Takes 30 seconds to set up.