The product-analytics alternative to Umami
Umami is excellent privacy-first web analytics, and it now has funnels and retention too. But per-person profiles, identity resolution, and autocapture are product analytics — and that’s where Pug, open source and self-hostable, goes further. Here’s the honest comparison.
- You want per-person profiles and identity, not aggregate stats
- You want autocapture — clicks, forms, rage and dead clicks
- You want product analytics with mobile SDKs, not web-only
- You want dead-simple, cookieless website traffic analytics
- You prefer an MIT license and a no-ClickHouse stack
- You don’t need per-person behavioral profiles
Pug vs Umami, feature by feature
The short version: choose Pug to own and self-host focused product analytics. Umami may be the better fit depending on what you need — the honest detail is below.
| Capability | Pug this page | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership & operations | ||
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes |
| Self-host price | Free forever | Free forever |
| Stack | Go + ClickHouse | Node + Postgres/MySQL |
| What it’s built for | ||
| Primary focus | Product analytics | Web analytics |
| Cookieless by default | Not in Pug | Yes |
| Ultra-light tracking script | Not in Pug | Yes |
| Product analytics depth | ||
| Funnels | Yes | Yes |
| Retention | Yes | Yes |
| User journeys / flow | Yes | Yes |
| Autocapture (clicks, forms, rage/dead) | Yes | No |
| Unified person profiles + identify() | Yes | No |
| Segmentation & Top-K by any property | Yes | Limited |
| Practical | ||
| SDKs | Web, Flutter, Node | Script + a few libraries |
| Maturity | Open beta | Mature |
Last updated June 2026. Umami capabilities reflect its publicly documented product; verify the latest on the vendor’s site.
Why look for a Umami alternative
A profile per person
Umami is aggregate and cookieless by design — great for traffic, but it doesn’t tie behavior to a person. Pug merges anonymous and identified activity into one profile on identify(), with traits that filter every insight.
Autocapture, not manual events
Umami needs you to define custom events. Pug autocaptures page views, clicks, scrolls, form submits, plus rage and dead clicks after one init() — then enriches each with geo, device, and UTM.
Built for product behavior
Umami v2 added funnels, retention, and journeys — but Pug is product-analytics-first: six insight types over raw events, ClickHouse-backed, with Web, Flutter, and Node SDKs.
Where Umami is still the better choice
Pug is a focused tool, not a platform. If your team needs any of the following, Umami is the better fit — these don’t ship in Pug:
- A simpler, lighter, cookieless setup — no consent banner
- An MIT license and a Postgres/MySQL stack (no ClickHouse)
- 35k+ GitHub stars and years of maturity
- Excellent website traffic stats, with funnels and goals
- A tiny tracking script with minimal performance cost
Focused product analytics, fully yours
Everything below ships today and runs the same whether you self-host or use the free cloud.
Autocapture out of the box
Page views, clicks, scrolls, form submits, plus rage and dead clicks — captured after one init(), then enriched with geo, device, and UTM on ingest.
Six insight types
Trends, Funnels, Retention cohorts, Segmentation, User-flow Sankey, and Top-K — all over raw events, filterable by any property.
Unified profiles
Anonymous events merge into one person on identify(). Traits like plan or email live on the profile and filter every insight, across devices.
Dashboards
KPI, line, area, bar, table, and Sankey tiles on one shared time window, with period-over-period comparison and threshold coloring.
Moving from Umami to Pug
Pug’s model is straightforward: events with properties, a person per user via identify(), and traits that filter every insight.
SDKs available today are Web (TypeScript), Flutter (Dart), and Node, with native Android, iOS, and React Native SDKs in active development — landing by launch while Pug is in open beta. Point your tracking calls at Pug, identify users where you already identify them in Umami, and anonymous history merges into a single profile. For setup steps and the API, see the SDKs page and the docs.
Analytics history doesn’t transfer between tools — Pug starts collecting the day you add the SDK, so most teams run it alongside Umami during cutover and switch once the dashboards they rely on are covered. There’s no rip-and-replace, and your raw events are exportable from day one.
Umami alternative — your questions
Is Pug a Umami alternative?
Partly — they start from different places. Umami is privacy-first web analytics (now with funnels, retention, and journeys); Pug is product analytics built around a profile per person, identity resolution, and autocapture. If you want lightweight website stats, Umami is excellent; if you want per-user behavior, choose Pug.
Doesn’t Umami have funnels and retention now?
Yes — Umami v2 added funnels, retention, user journeys, and goals, even on the free self-hosted version. The durable difference is identity: Umami is aggregate and cookieless, so it has no per-person profiles via identify() and no autocapture of clicks, forms, or rage and dead clicks. Pug ties every event to a person.
Are both open source and self-hostable?
Yes. Umami is MIT-licensed on Node with Postgres or MySQL; Pug is AGPL-3.0 as a single Go binary with Postgres, ClickHouse, and NATS. Both run entirely on your own infrastructure for free.
Is Pug as lightweight as Umami?
No. Umami is deliberately minimal — a tiny cookieless script and a simple stack. Pug captures more (autocapture, profiles, custom events) and uses ClickHouse for fast behavioral queries, so it does more by design.
Does my data stay on my servers?
With either tool, self-hosting keeps your data on your own infrastructure — a core reason teams choose open-source analytics.
Other Pug comparisons
Own your product analytics.
Open source, easy to self-host on a single Go binary, and free during open beta. Start a project and see live events in minutes.