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Revtrail vs Umami
Umami is MIT-licensed, runs on a Postgres or MySQL instance you already have, and costs nothing but the server. If you're comparing it to a paid hosted tool, be clear about what you're actually buying — because 'free' is a real answer and we're not going to argue you out of it.
Revtrail vs Umami, feature by feature
| Capability | Revtrail | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Licence and hosting | Hosted only, proprietary. | MIT-licensed, self-hostable on your own database, plus a paid cloud. |
| Revenue attribution | The product. Payments join the visitor's first-touch journey and every channel is ranked by the money it produced. | Not a built-in reporting dimension. |
| Who runs it | We do — upgrades, retention, uptime, and query performance. | You do, unless you use the cloud version. |
| Payment-provider integration | Stripe and RevenueCat webhooks, verified and deduplicated. | None built in — you'd build the join yourself. |
| Cost at low traffic | $9/mo. | Server cost only, if you self-host. |
| Scaling story | Events land in a columnar store sized for billions of rows. | Whatever your Postgres or MySQL instance can take. |
Umami pricing: Free forever if you self-host — you pay for the server. The hosted cloud is a paid monthly plan by event volume. Read off their own pricing page in August 2026 — check it before you decide, because plans move and we don't control that page.
If you'd enjoy running it, run it
Umami on a small VPS with a Postgres database is a perfectly good analytics setup, and for a lot of developers the operational overhead is close to zero because that infrastructure already exists. Nothing about paying us is better than that if traffic analytics is all you need. We'd rather you install Umami than pay $9/mo for something you didn't want.
What you'd be building yourself
The moment you want 'which channel produced revenue', the work isn't the dashboard — it's the join. You need a stable visitor identity that survives to checkout, a Stripe webhook receiver that verifies signatures and deduplicates event IDs, a mapping from checkout session to visitor, and a rollup that credits first touch while accumulating renewals. That's a few weeks of building and then it's yours to maintain forever. That pipeline is the product you're paying us for; the charts are incidental.
The database is the part that bites later
Umami on Postgres is fine until it isn't. Analytics queries over a large events table are exactly the workload row-stores struggle with, and 'my dashboard takes 30 seconds' arrives without warning at whatever traffic level your instance tops out at. Revtrail's events land in a columnar store and dashboards read pre-computed rollups, which is a boring architectural decision that you inherit for free.
So which one should you use?
Self-host Umami if you want traffic analytics, you already run a database, and you enjoy owning your stack — it's a genuinely good tool and the price is unbeatable. Pay for Revtrail when the question changes from 'how many visitors' to 'which channel produced revenue' and you'd rather not build and maintain the payment join yourself.
Questions people actually ask
- Is Umami really free?
- Self-hosted, yes — MIT-licensed, you pay for the server. Their hosted cloud is a paid monthly plan.
- Could I add revenue attribution to Umami myself?
- Yes. You'd need a stable visitor id that survives to checkout, a signature-verifying Stripe webhook receiver with event deduplication, a checkout-session-to-visitor mapping, and first-touch rollups. It's a known amount of work, not a research project — the question is whether you want to own it.
- Does Revtrail offer self-hosting for enterprise?
- No. Hosted only, on every plan.
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