Plausible and Umami are both privacy-friendly alternatives to Google Analytics.
Plausible is easier to use as a managed service and keeps its main reports in one clear dashboard.
Umami gives you more control over hosting and now includes a broader set of behavior reports in version 3.
Both are strong products.
But there is something important to know before choosing either one.
If you want complete website analytics without running your own infrastructure, Clics covers the core features these tools are chosen for, keeps the experience simple, and adds dedicated AI referral analytics, verified AI crawler tracking, and direct access for AI agents.
Let's compare them.
Setup
Plausible Cloud uses a hosted account and a tracking script.
You add the website, install the script, and verify that visits appear.
Plausible Community Edition is different. You host and maintain it yourself.
Umami also gives you two options.
You can use Umami Cloud or self-host the open-source application. The self-hosted installation requires Node.js and PostgreSQL, plus the usual work around updates, backups, security, and uptime.
Both products can be quick to start when you choose their managed services.
Self-hosting gives you more control, but your team becomes responsible for the service and its database.
Clics uses a lightweight tracker and a managed dashboard. You create a project, install the script, and start seeing website data without deploying an analytics application or maintaining a database.
For the simplest setup without self-hosting, Clics wins.
Privacy
Plausible describes itself as privacy-friendly analytics without cookies or personal data collection.
Umami also works without cookies, cross-site tracking, or automatic collection of personal data.
Clics is cookieless and privacy-first by design. It measures website activity without analytics cookies and does not require you to trade a simple setup for useful conversion reporting.
All three products are built for teams that want an alternative to advertising-led analytics.
The practical difference is what each product lets you do after that privacy decision.
Website analytics
Plausible gives you visitors, pageviews, sources, campaigns, landing pages, countries, devices, goals, events, funnels, and user journeys. Its dashboard is designed to keep the main website metrics easy to read.
Umami v3 covers traffic, campaigns, events, goals, funnels, journeys, retention, revenue, attribution, session replays, and heatmaps. It goes further into behavior analysis, but that wider surface also gives the team more reports to configure and interpret.
Clics covers the complete website analytics workflow: visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, session duration, realtime activity, pages, referrers, UTM campaigns, countries, devices, browsers, operating systems, custom events, goals, revenue, funnels, individual sessions, and automatic scroll tracking.
The difference is that Clics keeps those features inside a calm dashboard instead of turning basic website reporting into a large analytics project.
For a team that wants all the website analytics it needs without the extra complexity, Clics wins.
Goals, events, and funnels
Plausible supports goals and custom events. Plausible Cloud also includes funnel analysis, while Community Edition does not include marketing funnels, user journeys, or ecommerce revenue goals.
Umami v3 supports custom events, goals, funnels, journeys, revenue, and attribution.
Clics supports page goals and custom-event goals, including revenue tracking. Its funnels show how visitors move through two to seven ordered steps, where they drop off, and how long they take between steps.
You can also open an individual session and inspect the full activity timeline, including pageviews and custom events with their properties.
So Clics gives you the same core conversion workflow teams expect from modern web analytics: collect the action, define the goal, build the funnel, and inspect the visit behind the result.
It does this without requiring a separate product analytics implementation.
For straightforward conversion analysis, Clics is the strongest all-round choice.
Hosting and maintenance
Plausible Cloud and Umami Cloud handle the infrastructure for you.
Their self-hosted options give you more control, but someone must own deployments, upgrades, database backups, capacity, security, and recovery.
Plausible's own documentation describes self-hosting as an ongoing commitment. Umami's installation also depends on an application server and PostgreSQL.
Clics is managed for you.
You keep the benefits people usually want from self-hosted analytics, including a privacy-first and cookieless measurement model, without becoming the operator of another production service.
Choose self-hosting only when infrastructure control is a real requirement and your team has an owner for it.
For privacy-first analytics without maintenance work, Clics wins.
AI referrals
AI referrals are human visitors who click a link from an AI tool.
Plausible documents an AI Assistants channel and can show sources such as ChatGPT inside its acquisition reports.
Umami documents referrers, campaigns, and attribution, but the current pages reviewed do not establish a dedicated AI-provider analytics view.
Clics has a dedicated AI Analytics view.
It separates identifiable traffic from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. You can see which provider sent the visit, which pages received that traffic, the related UTM information, countries, devices, browsers, operating systems, and recorded custom events.
That makes AI traffic a visible acquisition channel with its own analysis instead of another row inside a general source report.
Attribution still depends on the referrer. Direct visits and privacy-stripped referrers cannot be reliably assigned, and a provider label does not identify an exact model version.
For AI referral analytics, Clics wins clearly.
AI crawlers
AI crawlers are automated systems requesting pages from your server.
They are different from people arriving through an AI referral.
Plausible documents bot filtering to keep non-human traffic out of normal website reports. That does not give you a complete view of which AI crawler requested which page.
The Umami documentation reviewed for this comparison does not establish a dedicated verified AI-crawler workflow.
Clics provides separate server-side AI crawler tracking.
A request is recorded only when both the user agent and source IP match the crawler operator's confirmed identity and published IP ranges.
You can see the verified provider, requested page, and HTTP response status when response-aware tracking is enabled.
The result tells you which verified crawlers reached your content and what the server returned. It does not claim that a request proves the page was indexed, cited, or used for training.
For verified AI crawler visibility, Clics wins.
AI agent access
Plausible and Umami provide APIs for teams that want to build their own reporting workflows.
Clics goes further by making analytics available through its API, TypeScript SDK, CLI, and MCP server.
That means ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other compatible agents can work directly with website statistics, pages, sessions, events, goals, and funnels.
The analytics are still available in the dashboard, but they are not trapped there.
For teams already using AI agents in marketing, development, or reporting, Clics provides the most direct workflow.
Pricing and operating cost
Plausible Cloud is a paid managed service. Community Edition has no Plausible subscription fee, but your team pays for and maintains the infrastructure.
Umami offers a managed cloud service and a self-hosted option. The self-hosted route also carries infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Clics is a managed product with a 30-day trial and no credit card required. Paid plans add the usage and access needed for advanced workflows, while AI Analytics is a Business feature.
The cheapest server bill is not always the lowest operating cost. Include the time required for upgrades, backups, security, and recovery when comparing self-hosted options.
For a team that wants a complete managed analytics product without maintaining infrastructure, Clics gives the clearest value.
Final verdict
Choose Plausible if you want its focused dashboard and its specific Cloud reporting workflow.
Choose Umami if self-hosting and its broader behavior reports are central to your decision.
Choose Clics if you want the best complete website analytics package.
Clics gives you the traffic, campaign, event, goal, revenue, funnel, session, realtime, and scroll reports you expect from modern web analytics. It stays cookieless and easy to set up. Then it adds the features the other two do not combine in the same simple product: dedicated AI referral analytics, verified AI crawler tracking, and native access through MCP, CLI, SDK, and API.
Plausible and Umami each make sense for a specific requirement.
For most teams that want powerful website analytics without complexity or self-hosting, Clics is the obvious choice.
Top comments (0)