Umami vs OpenPanel
Both are alternatives to Amplitude. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as OpenPanel vs Umami — same comparison, one verdict.
Umami
One clean dashboard, no cookies, five minutes to deploy.
Umami is deliberately small: page views, referrers, countries, devices and events on a single readable dashboard, with no cookies, no personal data and a script around two kilobytes. It runs on Node with Postgres or MySQL and deploys in minutes. MIT, about 38k stars. It is the honest recommendation for a large number of teams who believe they need product analytics and actually need to know which pages people read and where they came from — and the tracking script being 2 KB rather than 45 KB is a real difference on a phone.
OpenPanel
Mixpanel-style product analytics with a web-analytics front door.
OpenPanel sets out to be the middle ground this category is missing: simple web analytics for the questions you ask daily, plus event-based product analytics with funnels and retention for the ones you ask monthly, in a single self-hostable product. It is the youngest project in this comparison by a wide margin, which is the caveat to weigh honestly — the design is good and the track record is short. Worth a look if PostHog feels like more machinery than the problem deserves and Umami is not quite enough.
Side by side
| Umami | OpenPanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 95 | 90 |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Local-first | Yes | Yes |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Pricing | Free and open source to self-host. Umami Cloud has a free tier and paid plans. | Free and open source to self-host. Hosted plans available. |
Umami edges it on the Sovereignty Score, but the right pick depends on the trade-offs below.
Umami
Strengths
- +Genuinely simple — one dashboard, no training required
- +No cookies and no personal data, so no consent banner
- +Roughly 2 KB script, a meaningful page-speed win on mobile
- +MIT with no enterprise carve-out
Trade-offs
- −No funnels, cohorts or retention analysis worth the name
- −Not a product-analytics tool — do not expect it to be
- −No session replay or heatmaps
- −Small feature surface by design; you will outgrow it if you need depth
OpenPanel
Strengths
- +Sits deliberately between simple web analytics and full product analytics
- +Self-hostable with a straightforward Docker deployment
- +AGPL-3.0 with no enterprise directory carve-out
- +Lighter to run than PostHog for a fraction of the complexity
Trade-offs
- −Youngest and least proven project on this page
- −Small community, so few answers when something breaks
- −No session replay or feature flags
- −AGPL-3.0 copyleft needs reading if you intend to modify it
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-07-31. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.