Umami self-hosting problems: 8 reports from 14 public threads, and the migration failure that keeps coming back

Umami self-hosting problems, counted. Of the 66 items Friction holds about Umami (all dates, from GitHub issues and Hacker News; the reports, plus those already fixed upstream), 8 are about self-hosting and upgrades, resting on 14 separate public threads. Six of those 14 threads are one failure: a Prisma migration that breaks an upgrade, reported from August 2022 to May 2025.

The migration that fails, six times in three years

Six GitHub issues, one problem: a database migration fails or leaves the schema wrong when you upgrade.

1. 2022-08, #1393: "The migration 01_init is already recorded as applied in the database". Closed as completed, 2022-08.
2. 2022-08, #1406: "The update to 1.37.0 did not work out however". Closed as completed, 2022-08.
3. 2022-10, #1604: "The column account.account_uuid does not exist in the current database after upgrading to 1.39.2". Closed as completed, 2022-12.
4. 2023-08, #2206: "I updated the docker image to the latest version and got a prisma migrate deploy command error after container boot". Closed as completed, 2024-02.
5. 2024-04, #2645: "A migration failed to apply. New migrations cannot be applied before the error is recovered from". Closed as completed, 2025-01.
6. 2025-05, #3408: "I tried to go back to V2.17 and I have the same problem". Closed as not planned, 2025-08.

Five were closed as completed, the quickest within days, the slowest after about nine months; the newest, a Docker upgrade from 2.17 to 2.18 that ends in Prisma error P3009 (a failed migration in the target database), was closed as not planned. If you self-host, this is the failure to expect around a version boundary: back up the database before you pull a new image, and read the open and recently closed issues for the version you are moving to.

Two Heroku deploy failures, different causes

Two issues, three and a half years apart, both Heroku deploys that did not come up:

• 2022-04, #1071: "jsxDEV is not a function error" after updating to 1.29.2 and deploying on Heroku. Closed as completed within five weeks, 2022-05.
• 2025-11, #3687: "When deploying umami 3.0.0 to Heroku, the build fails at the check-db step even though the database connection works". Closed as not planned, 2026-05.

The rest of the self-hosting list

Six more reports, one thread each. Three are operational failures: a Docker container that restarts repeatedly after an update, a Podman healthcheck that cannot reach Umami on localhost, and a production build that runs out of memory on shared hosting (2022). One is a request, for a Docker image variant with a base path for subpath hosting (marked resolved, 2026-03).

Two come from Hacker News and are about where Umami is going rather than how it breaks:

• 2025-12, on the website's cloud-first pivot: "now you can't even find what you can self-host it on the front page!" (thread)
• 2026-01, from a homelab user: "I can't self host the blog's analytics service (umami.is) because obviously a home server not exposed online can't receive queries from the internet" (thread)

What people say when they leave

Self-hosting is the most-reported area among Umami's 29 recent reports (6). Three reports describe a move away, and 4 users named where they went: Plausible (2), PikaPods (1) and Hotjar (1). A count is the number of reports naming a tool, not a market share; the list, with sources, is on the Umami alternatives page.

How to read these numbers

A "report" is one problem, grouped from one or more public threads; a "source thread" is one issue or comment thread. The six migration issues and the Heroku issues above link to GitHub, and the two Hacker News comments link to their threads; the excerpts are copied word for word. The set is GitHub issues (78 threads) and Hacker News (9 threads) for Umami, 87 in all, so it shows what people filed and said in public, not every Umami user. The full list, with each report's sources, is on Umami's page, and what is stored and how to dispute a report is on the data page.

Planning to move to Umami, or building something against it? Say which product you want counted next at https://friction.grain64.com/request/?utm_source=devto.