Why Umami is Open Source

Umami is an open source company. That means our product's code is freely available for users to inspect, run and contribute to. But why open source? Why give away something valuable for free? That's a fair question, as being open source seems to be at odds with running a successful company.

When we started Umami, we had a clear vision: make a product that is accessible, transparent and empowers our users. Being open source allows us to accomplish that. Our decision to be open source wasn't a business move. Our motivation is deeply rooted in our core values, the product we want to develop, and the community we want to build.

Transparency and Trust

Too many analytics products act like black boxes. You send your data in and you get back a chart or some data, but you have no idea how it was calculated, what assumptions were made, or where else that data is being used.

As an analytics product, trust is everything. Our users need to know what's happening under the hood - how data is processed, how insights are generated, and how privacy is protected. Being open source allows our users to inspect the code, and contribute fixes and ideas. By being fully transparent, we can build lasting trust with our users.

Open Innovation

Innovation rarely happens in insolation. Generally companies gather feedback from their users to help drive their roadmap, but the decision ultimately ends up with the company. Users have very little actual influence over the product they use.

By making Umami open source we invite a global community of developers, analysts, business owners, and product engineers to help us improve our product — to build features we haven’t thought of, fix bugs we haven’t caught, and tackle use cases we haven’t seen. That’s the beauty of open source: it turns users into collaborators. It allows users with unique problems to create unique solutions — and often share them back.

User Freedom

The fundamental goal of open source is to grant users control over the software they use. Users of Umami can self-host, extend, fork or integrate however they like without worrying about vendor lock-in or asking for permission.

Our hosted product, Umami Cloud, operates on the same philosophy. You can export your data and any time, to have full control of your data on your own infrastructure. However you decide to use Umami, one thing is fundamental, the data is yours to control.

Good for Business

Open source is not about giving everything away for free and hoping for the best. It's a long term sustainable strategy.

Our model is simple: our core product Umami is free and open. It provides users with powerful analytics features typically only found in expensive, closed source products such as Mixpanel and Amplitude.

But as teams grow — and their needs become more complex — we offer a commercial layer: hosted services, advanced features, SLAs, and premium support.

With the built in trust from the community, it makes convincing others to use our product a lot easier.

Providing Value

Open source is humbling. When anyone can see your code, fork your project, or switch to a competitor, you can’t rely on lock-in. There are difficult challenges unique to open source companies around monetization, support and sustainability. But for us, we wouldn't have it any other way.

We are proud of what we have built so far and excited for what's to come. The best part is that we are building with our users and not just for them. Let's keep building.