Umami

Umami is the analytics tool for people who think Google Analytics is creepy and over-engineered. It's a privacy-focused, self-hosted alternative that gives you pageviews, referrers, and device stats without cookies, without tracking scripts that slow your site, and without needing a GDPR banner.

If you're running a SaaS or blog and just want to know "how many people visited and where did they come from," Umami is perfect. The dashboard is clean, the script is 2KB, and it runs on Postgres or MySQL. Plausible is the closest competitor — slightly faster queries (ClickHouse backend) but paid SaaS at $9/month. Matomo is the heavy enterprise alternative. Google Analytics is free but you are the product.

The catch: Umami's Postgres backend gets slow on high-traffic sites — Plausible's ClickHouse is better at scale. Self-hosting means you manage the infra. And the analytics are basic by design — no funnels, no cohort analysis, no A/B testing built in.