Umami Today: Where We Are and Where We're Going

Umami started in 2020 as a simple, open-source alternative to Google Analytics. The idea was straightforward: website analytics should be easy to understand, respect visitor privacy, and give you control over your data.

Those principles still guide the project, but they no longer describe the full scope of Umami.

From web analytics to an analytics platform

For the first few years, Umami was mostly about website traffic: pageviews, visitors, referrers, devices, countries, and custom events. That's still the foundation, but we've gradually expanded into other areas of analytics.

Today, Umami includes acquisition and campaign tracking, events, sessions, journeys, funnels, retention, cohorts, revenue attribution, session replays, heatmaps, website performance, and customizable dashboards through Boards.

The useful part isn't simply having more features. It's that they're working from the same underlying data.

You can see which campaign brought someone to your site, follow the resulting journey, understand where people dropped out of a funnel, inspect sessions and replays, and connect conversions back to their original sources. For many teams, that previously meant using several different tools.

How we got here

This expansion has happened gradually rather than through a single change in direction.

Umami began with lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics and later added events, goals, funnels, journeys, retention, attribution, distinct IDs, segments, and revenue tracking.

Umami v3 gave us a better foundation for expanding beyond the original dashboard. Boards made it possible to build custom views from different types of analytics data, while subsequent releases added session replays, heatmaps, Core Web Vitals, richer event and session properties, and more flexible filtering and reporting.

We've also continued improving the original web analytics experience throughout that work. You can still add a tracking script and immediately get a useful view of your website without configuring a data model or building a dashboard first.

Why we're expanding Umami

Analytics has become fairly fragmented. A team might use one product for website analytics, another for product analytics, another for session replay and heatmaps, and something else for reporting.

Specialized tools make sense when you need their depth, and we're not trying to reproduce every feature from every analytics product. But there's a large amount of overlap in the data these tools collect and the questions people use them to answer.

We think Umami can cover more of that common ground without becoming difficult to use.

A traffic source is more useful when you can see what those visitors did afterward. A funnel is more useful when you can inspect the sessions where people dropped out. Revenue is more useful when it's connected to the campaign, referrer, or journey that produced it.

That's increasingly how we're thinking about the product: not as a collection of separate analytics features, but as different ways of exploring the same activity.

Keeping Umami simple

Expanding the product also means being careful about complexity. We don't want using Umami to require an analytics specialist or a lengthy setup process.

The basic experience should remain familiar. Install Umami and you get understandable website analytics immediately. If that's all you need, you don't have to go any further.

When you have a more specific question, the deeper tools are there. Funnels and journeys can help investigate conversion. Replays and heatmaps can show how people interact with a page. Distinct IDs, cohorts, and retention can help understand users over time. Boards can combine the metrics a particular team or client cares about.

The aim is to add depth without making that depth a prerequisite for using the product.

Privacy and open source

The broader scope hasn't changed the project's approach to privacy or ownership. Umami remains open source and privacy-focused, with cookieless analytics by default and no advertising profiles or sale of visitor data.

Umami Cloud is available for teams that want a hosted service, while the project remains self-hostable for organizations that want to operate it on their own infrastructure.

We see those characteristics as part of the foundation of Umami rather than features that compete with the rest of the platform.

Where we're heading

We're continuing to develop Umami as a broader analytics platform, with more emphasis on connecting the pieces that already exist.

That includes better connections between acquisition, behavior, conversion, and revenue; easier ways to move from aggregate metrics into individual sessions and users; more useful reporting and visualization; and APIs and integrations that make Umami data useful outside the Umami interface.

There will always be products that go much deeper into individual areas of analytics, and that's not something we're trying to change. We're more interested in how much of the everyday analytics workflow can be handled well by one coherent product without making it difficult to understand.

Umami started as a simpler way to understand website traffic. Six years later, that's still part of what it does, but it's no longer a complete description of the project.