BetterMeter vs Umami
The most popular open-source analytics: MIT, self-hostable, generous free cloud.
Umami is the analytics tool you can genuinely own. It is MIT-licensed, it runs on a cheap VPS, and its cloud offering has a free tier large enough that many teams never pay. For a self-hosting team on a budget, it is very hard to argue against.
BetterMeter cannot match that and does not try to. There is no self-hosted edition, and there will not be one this quarter.
What BetterMeter offers instead is coverage of the surfaces Umami does not model at all: CLI invocations, MCP tool calls, API requests, AI crawler activity, and the join from ad spend through to CRM revenue.
Side by side
Every comparison on this site answers the same twelve rows, so you can carry a row from one page to the next. means partial: possible, but not what the product is built to do.
| Capability | BetterMeter | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Website analytics | Yes: One script tag. No cookies or browser storage by default. Included on Free. | Yes: Modern, lightweight, funnels and journeys included. |
| CLI tool analytics | Yes: trackCommand() and wrapCommander() in the Node SDK. Starter plan and up. | No: Websites only. |
| MCP server analytics | Yes: trackTool() and wrapMcpServer() in the Node SDK. Starter plan and up. | No: Websites only. |
| API endpoint analytics | Yes: trackApi() and expressMiddleware() in the Node SDK. Starter plan and up. | Partial: An events API you can post to; no API-request model. |
| AI assistant referral attribution | Yes: Ten platforms named separately, including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overview and Copilot. Included on Free. | Partial: Assistant visits appear as ordinary referrers. |
| AI crawler and bot reporting | Yes: 126 crawler signatures across 12 categories, 20 of them AI crawlers, reported rather than silently filtered. Included on every plan, Free included. | No: Bot traffic is excluded rather than reported. |
| Ad spend joined to CRM revenue | Yes: Meta ad spend joined to HubSpot deals on click IDs, not on email matching. | Partial: Revenue tracking; no ad-platform or CRM join. |
| Queryable by an AI assistant | Yes: A CLI, an MCP server and a Claude Code skill ship with the product. | No: Dashboard and REST API. |
| Cookie-free by default | Yes: Anonymous by default. Identity and durable ad attribution are opt-in. | Yes: Cookie-free and GDPR-friendly. |
| Self-hosting | No: Hosted service only. There is no open-source or self-hosted edition. | Yes: MIT-licensed. Runs on your own hardware, free. |
| Data region | United States. There is no EU region yet. | Wherever you host it. |
| Entry price | Free for 10,000 events a month, covering web analytics, AI referrals and the full crawler report. CLI, MCP and API analytics start at $16 a month. | Free self-hosted. Cloud has a free tier, then from $20 a month. |
Umami details checked against public vendor pages on 2026-08-24. Pricing and features change: check Umami directly before deciding.
Reasons to choose them instead
- Self-hosting under an MIT licence, at no cost and with no vendor at all. BetterMeter has no answer to this.
- You choose the data region because you choose the server.
- The cloud free tier is far larger than BetterMeter's 10,000 events a month.
- Funnels and journeys are available even on the free tier.
What they do not measure
- CLI, MCP and API traffic are modelled event sources rather than custom events you invent.
- AI assistants are named and reported separately from ordinary referrers.
- 126 crawler signatures are reported, including 20 AI crawlers, instead of being filtered away.
- Ad spend joins to CRM deals, and every report is reachable from a CLI and from MCP tools.
Which one should you use?
Pick Umami if owning the data and the deployment matters more than anything else, or if a large free tier decides it. Pick BetterMeter if the questions you cannot answer are about AI traffic, crawlers, or your own developer tooling, and a hosted service is acceptable.
Questions people actually ask
- Is BetterMeter open source?
- No. The dashboard, the SDKs and the tracker are not published under an open-source licence, and there is no self-hosted edition. If that is a requirement, Umami, Plausible and Matomo all offer one.
- Could I run Umami and BetterMeter together?
- Yes. Both are lightweight script tags and they do not conflict. A common arrangement is Umami self-hosted for baseline web traffic you want to own outright, with BetterMeter for the AI-traffic, crawler and developer-tool reporting it does not cover.