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Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics
- rckt 2y agoBeen using it for my personal website for over a year as a self-hosted solution. Not great if you want just to set it up and forget about it. There are breaking changes every now and then on every part, DB and the FE. So at some point it just broke for me and stopped showing relevant data. I ended up switching to piratepx as it was enough for me to see if there were any visits.
- ayewo 2y agoSame here. My self-hosted instance is broken right now and I've not been able to find time to fix it. The pace of change was easy to keep up with when it was just 1 guy. Now it appears they have built an entire team and raised some VC to build out their SaaS.
- ksec 2y ago>Now it appears they have built an entire team and raised some VC to build out their SaaS. Is that the case? Just FYI there was a scam claiming to be them and raising funds about Web 3 and Crypto.
- wallawe 2y agoCan vouch for this as well. The API has breaking changes all the time and there's no notice whatsoever. We'll transition away soon.
- petargyurov 2y agoI like umami. What stood out to me is their customer support. I had some sort of issue where my free limit was always maxed out. They responded and resolved it very quickly. As a free-tier user I expected to wait days/weeks. Would recommend.
- xandrius 2y agoI'm always curious why people pick project names the way they do. I'm seeing a trend of slapping a random simple Japanese word to a new project without explanation. Maybe it doesn't need one but at least it would make the name more memorable to me.
- MortyWaves 2y agoI think it's the <current year> meme. Just how for a while every JavaScript library had to end in .js, and before that when every electronics manufacturer put an i in front of product names until Apple stopped them. Another example is libraries being described as "blazing fast" or "minimal". It's basically bankrupted creativity.
- kgeist 2y agoIt's easier to google something like "CalendarJS" rather than just "Calendar," which could give you anything but the JS library you're looking for. I think it’s simply practical.
- MortyWaves 2y agoSo would "JavaScript calendar"
- yreg 2y agoNot really. CalendarJS is a specific library in this case, JavaScript Calendar is all of them.
- johnisgood 2y agoYeah, "blazing fast" is a very common description for Rust projects...
- kgeist 2y agoUnique names are more easily googleable, and most unique English words are already taken. So, I think it makes sense to consider other languages. Japanese also has simple phonetics (open syllables), making it generally easy to pronounce—unlike, say, Slavic languages.
- alkonaut 2y agoDoes the no-cookie thing mean you can't count e.g. unique/returning visitors? Or is there any privacy-friendly way of doing that?
- remon 2y agoThis almost always resolves to "not using actual cookies, but exactly the same privacy and security paradigm as cookies"
- alkonaut 2y agoI mean you can probably do something clever with this like rainbow tables on fingerprints or something like that which is more probabilistic so you never store individual fingerprints. Would be interesting to know what the solution is.
- remon 2y agoSure but any probabilistic approach is either relatively inaccurate reduces it's usefulness for this use case, or accurate which raises the same identifiability concerns cookies would introduce. I guess my point was; this has been thought about already. (Pseudo) anonymized attribution is a bit of a solved problem and you can do it with or without cookies. That's mostly a implementation detail rather than a distinguishing feature.
- alkonaut 2y ago> (Pseudo) anonymized attribution is a bit of a solved problem and you can do it with or without cookies. How is it typically done without cookies then? > any probabilistic approach is either relatively inaccurate reduces it's usefulness for this use case, or accurate which raises the same identifiability concerns cookies would introduce How so? Even if it's accurate you wouldn't be storing anything the information (random id or fingerprint) for the individual user, so you would only be able to answer with reasonable certainty whether you saw the user before or not. You can't identify anyone from that (other than identify them as a new vs returning user) so there is no identifiability concern, unless of course one thinks that constitutes a concern in itself which I don't think the GDPR does.
- MortyWaves 2y agoI would definitely be open to trying this because it seems to have significantly more features than Plausible, but then I'd lose all my historical stats. The downside of any analytics is this kind of trapped in situation.
- marvinblum 2y agoYou can find a nice list of privacy-respecting analytics tools on European Alternatives [0], including mine, Pirsch [1]. I've been in this space for ~3 1/2 years, so if you have any questions, please let me know :) [0] https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-services https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... [1] https://pirsch.io https://pirsch.io
- eitland 2y agoNot related to you, but from a description in the first link, in the description for Plausible: > Because it does not use cookies their is no need to show cookie banner for this service. This is IMO a rather fundamental misunderstanding of the current situation. I'd be hesitant to using a product from someone who I think have misunderstood completely what the rules are about. (Again, IMO and also IANAL but I have followed GDPR more closely than most people.) GDPR is about collection information, as far as I can see, the technical detailsbof how you do it doesn't matter. It could be pure magic and would still be illegal.
- jgalt212 2y agoAt the end of the day it comes down to enforcement. If the rules make no sense, and they can't be enforced. They might as well not exist.
- Reubensson 2y agoYeah, not using cookies is irrelevant if you use other means to track user. Also people like to think they need to show the "cookie banner" for all cookies regardless of how they are used.
- marvinblum 2y agoCorrect, it's not so much about Cookies, but how data is collected and what is stored. We have done a privacy risk analysis with an external lawyer and data protection officer, and concluded that Pirsch is in line with GDPR as we do not collect nor store personal identifiable information (PII). Processing stuff like IP addresses for example is legal as long as they are not stored and only cached for a reasonable amount of time (a few milliseconds in our case). If you're interested, we have extensive documentation on this. You can reach out to support@pirsch.io to get it :) If anyone is interested in doing something similar. This did cost us about 8,000 € in Germany.
- lemagedurage 2y agoYou can see the influx of presumably hackernews visitors (through GitHub/Google) on the demo instance that's linked from their website :) https://umami.is/ https://umami.is/ https://eu.umami.is/share/LGazGOecbDtaIwDr/umami.is https://eu.umami.is/share/LGazGOecbDtaIwDr/umami.is
- codetrotter 2y agoIs the demo using real data? And if it is, is there that notable an influx? Zoom out to 90 days, and then today doesn’t seem much different from any other day.
- lemagedurage 2y agoYes, it's real data, and by now the influx is apparent in the 90 day view too!
- Shacklz 2y agoAs someone who doesn't really often look at these sort of charts... traffic coming via chatGPT being higher than Bing was quite the surprise to me. Makes of course total sense, but still astonishing to see the actual numbers in comparison.
- dmje 2y agoI really love Umami but the user / team management is incredibly weird and I still haven’t figured it out. Anyone else finding the same?
- xz18r 2y agoI have been using (and self-hosting) Umami for 3 websites for the better of a year. While good for my use-case, which is just having some 'fun' insights of how many visits my pages get and where that traffic is coming from, it's mostly aimed at my profile I reckon. Would never use it for a business purpose. Also the UI is somewhat immature still. So all in all: total fan, otherwise I wouldn't be using it, but it's fairly limited in what it can do.
- baxtr 2y agoHave you tried the similar tools as well like matomo?
- xz18r 2y agoI have checked them out and decided not to go with it since it was overkill for my situation. Like I said, I don't need a whole lot more than visits, geo, referrer, and track events[1] which work really nicely. If I ever do need a GA4 alternative for 'serious' purposes though, I might consider Matomo as it seems a lot more complete. [1] https://umami.is/docs/track-events https://umami.is/docs/track-events
- pastorhudson 2y agoI really like the simplicity of the ui. I’m curious what makes it immature vs mature in your opinion?
- xz18r 2y agoThere are options missing from the admin panel or the dashboards that intuitively seem basic. Some examples: - excluding certain data from your report (such as localhost visits) - setting a default time range - on the 'overview' of all your domains, setting a time range that applies to all and not just one domain individually (this particularly felt really counterintuitive) There is more I'd come up with if I actually pulled it up, but the overall throughline is that it just feels 'too basic' at this moment. Especially for something that goes beyond tracking visits on your personal blog and/or hobby website.
- HelloUsername 2y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198329 aug-2020 227 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27181622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27181622 may-2021 42 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284853 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284853 may-2022 42 comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184773 aug-2020 9 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422333 sept-2020 3 comments
- libsofhn 2y ago[dead]
- ddxv 2y agoI've used umami for my projects with low volume and it has worked great. Set it up on it's own instance connected to a postgresdb and it's been great for the past year. Also there is a nice python library for calling the functions directly: https://github.com/mikeckennedy/umami-python https://github.com/mikeckennedy/umami-python I do wish it would track bot traffic though. My site of 10m pages is heavily crawled by bots and I wish I could keep track of them a bit more.
- moebrowne 2y agoI think you're looking for the `DISABLE_BOT_CHECK` env variable See https://umami.is/docs/environment-variables#:~:text=DISABLE_BOT_CHECK https://umami.is/docs/environment-variables#:~:text=DISABLE_...
- karparov 2y agoNo, umami is a basic taste. Why can't people be more creative with finding good names? Salt? X? Yes, Apple is a terrible name too, but at least it was historically called Apple Computers and only changed once they had a huge brand already.
- rathish_g 2y agoUrchin - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urchin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urchin_(software) Urchin Software Corp. was acquired by Google in April 2005, forming Google Analytics
- tnolet 2y agoyeah, funky how 20 years later the UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) query param is still the defacto standard tracking tag.
- kevindamm 2y agoThere was debate on the team back in ~2009 over changing the query params -- when you estimate how much bandwidth and disk is consumed per day at the scale of Analytics, just for the difference of a character or two on a handful of query params -- even well over a decade ago, it really was astounding. The migration would never be total, though, because more than a few users had copied the analytics script to their CDN or were in some way depending on a local fork of it. Some backwards compatibility would need to be maintained, perhaps for as long as the product exists. For this and other reasons, changing the params (and supporting both, indefinitely) wasn't pursued.
- SethMurphy 2y agoUrchin, the software name of the precursor to GA, has an umami flavor. I find the naming quite clever and easy to remember.
- knowknow 2y agoAre you remembering the name because you’re remembering the tool or just the flavor? I don’t think hijacking a well known term makes it memorable.
- TZubiri 2y agoWhat an oxymoron. There needs to be a convincing explanation of how google style analytics can be privacy focused, otherwise I disregard this as a clone with feel good branding
- Trasmatta 2y agoIt stores no personal data, requires no cookies, and ships nothing to Google. You host it yourself.
- TZubiri 2y ago1) GA doesn't store personal data either 2) who gives a shit, genuinely who cares about cookies? 3) so it's privacy oriented in that the dev doesn't send their data to google, but users send their data to someone anyways? And why would sending data to a self hosting rando be safer than sending it to google from a user and security perspective?
- cobalt60 2y agoStop smoking mids and why don't you see what umami actually does?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- lukevp 2y agoGoogle’s entire business is your personal data. I’d much rather my browsing info be sent to some small website for local analysis for their own purposes vs. hoovered up by the largest data broker in the world and aggregated with everything else about me. Did you read the recent article about how reCAPTCHA is used for tracking you across the internet? I have no reason to believe GA isn’t similar. And just think about how much info they have on you from reading all of your emails.
- SethMurphy 2y agoIt is privacy oriented from the perspective of the company, not the individual. I think there is some value in that. Although it makes it no more likely to be secure or private for the individual end user visiting the site though.
- c16 2y agoGlad to see Umami on HN. I've been using it for the past year or so using their docker-compose setup. Really liking it. A big :+1: from me.
- maelito 2y agoEasy to deploy with dokploy
- _fat_santa 2y agoSomething I've noticed about all these privacy respecting analytics apps is they all seem to be using a similar UI, in fact the only one I know that uses a different UI is Motamo. I wonder why that is? My suspicion is this is layout is becoming a "standard UI" for analytics software. Often times I see companies in the same space largely mimic each others UI's. Things like the "Find Care" option in most healthcare sites looks largely the same. Same thing goes for LLM frontends and time tracking software. It just seems that each team has individually come to the same conclusion about what the "best UI" is for a given task. Umami Demo - https://eu.umami.is/share/LGazGOecbDtaIwDr/umami.is https://eu.umami.is/share/LGazGOecbDtaIwDr/umami.is Simple Analytics Demo - https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com Fathom Analytics Demo - https://app.usefathom.com/share/deasaicp/hilarious+platypus?comparison=none https://app.usefathom.com/share/deasaicp/hilarious+platypus?...
- willsmith72 2y agoTo me it's just a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it. I don't agree that "each team has individually come to the same conclusion". You can develop a product way quicker by cloning. In this case the value prop is in the open source, self host, privacy first. Why try to innovate on the UI?
- catwhatcat 2y agoin my exp, there's only a few good UI libraries out there which is part of it, but I think generally the "standard UI" is a thing much like it happened to architecture and then we got the reset of brutalist / modernism, to highly generalize. Just thinking aloud, choosing between novel, unknown, and interesting UI/UX vs proven, reliable, and commonplace (read: boring) is always a toss up, coming down to the audience. Biz interests usually tend to the latter, which imo is good because you want people using the product, not thinking about how to use the product.
- qudat 2y agohttps://pico.sh/analytics https://pico.sh/analytics for a tabular view of analytics in a TUI
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- m00dy 2y agoWhy pay for analytics when I can set up Umami with a single command ?
- machine_ghost 2y agoI know it's dumb, but when a library requires me to install Yarn to install it, I think so much less of it. I just hate the idea that I have to install an entire package manager simply to use some Node.js code, when NPM almost certainly could have done the job.
- skrebbel 2y agoIt's not a library, it's an application. You're quoting a section called "Installing from Source". Obviously that'll require you to use the build tools the developers happened to have chosen. There's also a Docker option if you don't want to do that.
- EGreg 2y agoIf anything requires me to install Docker, Yarn, or even Node.js, I immediately lose interest. Real programmers use butterflies!
- MarcelOlsz 2y agoYou can pry my JS ecosystem from my cold (& well manicured) dead hands.
- samtheprogram 2y agoSeems like it’s because they’re using the resolutions feature to override a dependency resolution. The alternative would be forking at least 1 package, all the way down to the dependency, to fix the version. There’s a reason there’s 3 popular package managers for Node that aren’t NPM. Yes, part of that is the culture/ecosystem, but not entirely.
- Ciunkos 2y agoThe npm supports overrides field in package.json since like a few years already.
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- Benjamin_Dobell 2y agoI just shut down a companion app for a game I'd reverse engineered — developed over the last 2-3 months. The companion app, among other things: - Generated insights — https://bizarre.gg/meta https://bizarre.gg/meta - Show detailed interactive gameplay logs (from "Umami" analytic events) — https://bizarre.gg/runs/00493ccf-5b96-523c-beb4-06e8154cc158 https://bizarre.gg/runs/00493ccf-5b96-523c-beb4-06e8154cc158 Thread w/ development overview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080066 I used Umami and mention it in the video. Admittedly, it was a mistake for my use case. I had to heavily modify Umami due to lack of features and performance issues. There are a also lot of bugs in the project which are immediately revealed simply by enabling TypeScript strict flags, and some more linting rules. Granted, I was not really using Umami exactly as intended. I do think it's great this project exists, and whilst I had to heavily modify it for my use case, I did at least help the upstream project diagnose one issue: https://github.com/umami-software/umami/pull/2946#issuecomment-2477095367 https://github.com/umami-software/umami/pull/2946#issuecomme...
- echelon 2y agoThe company that made the game (Tempo Games) sent you a cease and desist? That's not very friendly of them.
- SeanAnderson 2y agoThey also gave him a job offer, but yes, Tempo has been pretty aggressive in trying to keep their game from getting "solved" by third party tooling collecting analytics on the game.
- account42 2y agoAn honest job offer or a "please travel to a jurisdiction where we can more thoroughly fuck you over" offer?
- blinding-streak 2y agoHow well does Umami deal with detecting (and ignoring) bots? Bot traffic is significant and I've noticed different vendors have varying degrees of success filtering out bots versus humans.
- mcao 2y agoBot detection is enabled automatically.
- leothecool 2y agoMy recent experience with wanting analytics for an enterprise application was that for my limited needs, it was easier to roll my own than to deal with evaluating all the options and integrating with another service. There are already a ton of privacy focused alternatives to google analytics. So many such that finding one that serves a niche is practically ungoogleable.
- srameshc 2y agoI have been using Umami and I can't thank the people behind this project enough. It just works !! Not just it works well, they pull no tricks when it comes to self deployment and running it on your own. Many open source has a "run your own" option, but they would also want you to not run and use the managed version. I understand that part that they want to make money. But Umami, just works, you will never realize that there is an option where you need to pay $$. But if I make enough from my work, I am sure becoming a paid subscriber for their managed analytics.
- SeanAnderson 2y agoRelated, shoutout to Goatcounter - https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/ It's an incredibly bare-bones analytics tracker, but it's free and cloud-hosted which were the two things I was most looking for in an alternative to GA. I run a website that gets about ~300k pageviews/month. Vercel was eating my wallet alive with their analytics offering. All I wanted with my tracker was to feel motivated by knowing that traffic was going up and to the right. I didn't want to pay hundreds a month for that and I didn't want to manage my own server just to have analytics. Goatcounter addressed my needs well!
- coffeefirst 2y agoI just stood up a new toy project (excepted traffic is next to nothing but I still want to be able to tell) and was just thinking I needed something like this. Thanks!
- pacmansyyu 2y agoWe recently migrated from Matomo to Umami at work after hitting scaling issues with Matomo, even after implementing various MySQL optimizations and archiving reports through cron at a decent interval. Even the most basic tasks like loading the dashboard was painfully slow (before you comment on the resource usage, our instances were quite huge and the load was alright). Surprisingly, Umami has been handling our traffic volume without breaking a sweat on much smaller instances. I suspect PostgreSQL's superior handling of concurrent writes plays a big role here compared to MySQL/MariaDB. Except for the team/user management, everything feels much nicer on Umami. Shameless plug: As part of the migration, I also took the opportunity to learn some Rust by writing a small utility that uses the Umami API to generate daily/weekly analytics reports and sends them via email[1]. Pretty happy with how it turned out, though I'm still learning Rust so any feedback or suggestions for improvement are welcome! [1]: https://github.com/Thunderbottom/umami-alerts https://github.com/Thunderbottom/umami-alerts
- calyhre 2y agoCould you describe a bit the load and the server/db specs? I’m using Plaisible right now and I wonder how it would handle with similar specs
- pacmansyyu 2y agoWe had separate database and app instances, the DB instance had 32 cores and 64GB memory, which we doubled to keep up with our requirements. We have tens of millions of visits daily, and our database was close to ~300GB within the first few months. For plausible I believe that since it runs on Postgres, scaling should not be a problem as long as you scale the resources with it.
- XCSme 2y agoI am also curious about the traffic amount and server specs. In my experience, MySQL still runs very well until you have 10-20m rows (on a single machine, like 8vCPU and 32GB RAM), after it gets trickier to get instant responses.
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- newbie578 2y agoI had a lot of problems with getting Umami to work with Vercel, in the end I abandoned it and used Vercel Analytics. First Umami was being blocked by all ad blockers and it caused my web app to crash, then I had to use some workaround which allowed it to work with ad blockers but stopped my Express app from sending responses back to the frontend. It irritated me so much, because there is not enough documentation for it, although I did find multiple people reporting something similar like me. I just called quits on it, analytics shouldn't be that complex to setup if you are not self-hosting, the Vercel one is serving me okayish for now.
- Olshansky 2y agoWanted to also give this product a shout out ($1/month): https://onedollarstats.com https://onedollarstats.com drizzle.team is alway delivering.
- cantalopes 2y agoToo bad it's in node
- ndriscoll 2y agoSomething that specifically has documentation on bypassing anti-tracking security software[0] is not "privacy-focused". Your users have indicated that they do not want you to track them and have gone out of their way to stop you from doing so. Attempting to bypass that is specifically taking steps to undermine their privacy when you absolutely know they do not want that. A "privacy-focused" solution (not that software that's specifically made for spying can be "privacy-focused". Let's call a spade a spade: it's spyware) would at least use standard endpoints to make it easy for users to opt-out by blocking those endpoints. In this way, GA is actually more privacy friendly. "Some lists can be overly agressive" is also a bad attempt at gaslighting. Your software watches the way I browse, including tracking purely client-side events and outbound links (see "journeys"). You attempt to track things like device characteristics and what operating system I use. That's creepy and voyeuristic to me, and is exactly what spyware blockers are for. Actual privacy-friendly analytics looks more like the Steam hardware & software survey where they ask if you'd like to tell them these things, and show you exactly what they are going to collect. [0] https://umami.is/docs/bypass-ad-blockers https://umami.is/docs/bypass-ad-blockers
- account42 2y agoAbsolutely, privacy preserving analytics is an oxymoron. And besides survers without informed consent the best solution is to simply track less. Think hard about what information you actually need and will even look at for more than once.
- kazinator 2y agoThere is no alternative to Google Analytics, because people use Google Analytics (or whatever it is called now: Webmaster Tools?) specifically to find out how Google is interacting with their site. Nobody cares how Umami interacts with their site, because nobody's heard of it.
- ksec 2y agoProviding some context which I think is missing. It originally started as shown HN a little over 4 years ago [1]. It was a one man (Maco )side project. For a long time, may be at least 2-3 years it was simply an open source, use as you please MIT software with no hosting offering. I remember when it launch the first thing I notice was the graphics design was so much better than other offerings. While I was interested at the time, I ultimately went with plausible. Mostly because it seems to have a sustainable backing, and another major reason was the usage of ClickHouse. If you want best resources usage / scale / performance analytics I don't think there are many other choices. A lot of other solutions, including pleasurable settled on clickhouse as well. I have recently went to check on them again and looks like things have progressed a lot. They have hosting offering and they are also working on Clickhouse integration. Between Urchin, Reinvigorated, and another one I can remember its name, it's been a long time I am excited about analytics. I just hope if Mcao read this. Congratz and well done . [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24184773
- piotrkulpinski 2y agoIf you're interested, you can find a list of similar, open-source alternatives (including Umami) on https://openalternative.co/categories/website-analytics https://openalternative.co/categories/website-analytics
- jordiburgos 2y agoWhy is it developed in JavaScript? Wouldn't it be better for the user response to make in a more performant language?