Open Source DataFast Alternatives

Umami is a privacy-first analytics platform that puts traffic, campaigns, behavior, conversions and revenue in one place. It sets no cookies and does not follow people around the web, so a team gets the numbers it needs without building a profile of every visitor who lands on the site.

The application runs on Node.js version 18.18 or later and stores everything in PostgreSQL version 12.14 or newer. A single DATABASE_URL entry in an env file is enough to start, and the build step creates the tables on first install along with an initial admin login you should change straight away.

A handful of choices shape how an installation behaves.

• Self-hosted or cloud: run the platform on your own server or use the hosted service, with the same product either way.
• Docker deployment: an official image and a compose file bring up Umami together with a PostgreSQL database in one command.
• Two-factor authentication: a 64-character hex encryption key switches it on, and it stays unavailable until that key exists.
• Configurable API base: the API_URL setting points internal interface calls at a relative path or an absolute host proxied through the local route.
• Plain upgrades: pull the repository, install dependencies and rebuild, or pull the new Docker image and recreate the containers.

Umami suits site owners who want to answer questions about visits and revenue while keeping the raw data on infrastructure they control. The requirements stay modest, a Node server and a Postgres instance, which makes it a reasonable fit for a small virtual machine.

Plausible counts visits without counting people. It stores no personal data and no IP addresses, and it sets no cookies or persistent identifiers, which keeps it compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR and removes the consent banner that a conventional analytics script drags along with it.

Everything lands on a single page rather than a tree of menus and custom reports, and the tracking script is small enough not to slow a site down. The backend is Elixir and Phoenix, general data sits in PostgreSQL and analytics data in ClickHouse, with a React and Tailwind frontend.

What arrives beyond the visitor count is worth listing.

• Goals and funnels: track conversions, revenue attribution and funnels through custom events and dimensions, with codeless tracking for outbound clicks, downloads, form completions and 404 pages.
• Modern routing: single page apps work out of the box, including pushState and hash based routing.
• Reports and sharing: weekly or monthly email or Slack reports, traffic spike and drop alerts, role based team access, and dashboards shared publicly or by link.
• Search insights: the Google Search Console integration brings keyword data into the same dashboard.
• Data out: an events API sends data in, while a stats API and CSV export take it back out.

Self-hosting means Plausible Community Edition, a free long term release published twice a year. It omits the premium funnels, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and sites API, and its bot filtering is basic rather than advanced. In exchange you get the raw ClickHouse data and full control over where the server sits.

The very first version of Fathom Analytics stayed open source after the product became a paid hosted service. Fathom Lite is that code, a simple website analytics dashboard you install on a server of your own, downloaded millions of times.

The maintainers are clear about its status. No new features are being added to Lite, though they commit to maintaining it long term and fixing bugs as they surface. Anyone comparing it against today's hosted product should expect an older interface and a narrower feature set.

The README spells out plainly what the self-hosted version lacks.

• Cookies: Lite uses cookies, while the hosted product tracks without them.
• Dashboard: the current view with live visitors, filters and detail panels is not part of Lite.
• API: programmatic access to your data belongs to the hosted plans only.
• Events: custom events, ecommerce tracking and campaign parameters are absent.
• Operations: scaling, backups and a global CDN become your responsibility rather than someone else's.

Installing it needs Go and npm for a development build, or the prebuilt Docker image for a faster start, after which an account is registered from the command line and the dashboard answers on port 8080. Tracking begins by creating a site and pasting the snippet into your pages, and a content security policy needs the instance host allowed for scripts and images. Lite suits anyone who wants basic, self-owned traffic numbers and can live with a codebase in maintenance rather than development.