Comparison

Ripples vs Umami

Umami is the best free option in privacy-friendly analytics. It is MIT licensed, you can self-host it on a box you already pay for, and Umami Cloud has a genuinely free tier at 100,000 events a month rather than a trial. It has also grown well past traffic reporting: session replay, heatmaps, funnels, retention and a revenue view that credits revenue to a referrer all ship today. What it does not have is a connection to your billing provider, so every figure in that revenue view is one your own code fired an event for, and there is no ad-spend side at all. Pick Umami if you want free, private analytics and do not mind instrumenting revenue by hand. Pick Ripples if you want the money side to arrive on its own and to be told when a channel pays back.

Checked August 2026 No affiliate links We are biased, and we say where

Choose Ripples if

You want revenue to arrive from your billing provider rather than from events you maintain
You spend money on Google Ads and want to know whether it comes back
You want retention cohorts split by acquisition channel

Choose Umami if

Free and open source is the requirement
You want to self-host and own the data outright
Traffic reporting is genuinely all you need

Side by side

Ripples and Umami, row by row.

Prices are the published list prices as of August 2026. The last group is the one where Umami may well beat us, and it is in the same table as the rest on purpose.

Feature and price comparison between Ripples and Umami
Price
	Ripples	Umami
Entry price	Free until $1K MRR, then $9/mo	Free on Umami Cloud, or free self-hosted
What the price meters	100,000 visits and actions a month	100,000 events a month on the free cloud tier
Next tier up	$19/mo for 10 projects	Umami Cloud Pro, $20/mo for 1M events
Self-hosted option	No	Yes, MIT licensed, free
Revenue tracking	Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy	Revenue events you fire yourself
Google Ads spend	Included on every plan	Not available
Money and payback
Revenue from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy	Yes	No
Revenue credited to the channel that brought the customer	Yes	Yes, if you send revenue events
Payback period, per channel	Yes	No
Google Ads spend imported	Yes	No
ROAS against real paid revenue	Yes	No
Retention
Retention curves	Yes	Retention report
Retention split by acquisition channel	Yes	No
Traffic
Real-time traffic, referrers and campaigns	Yes	Yes
AI assistant referrals as their own channel	Yes	Shows as a referrer
Telegram Mini Apps and native apps	Yes	Script and events API
What Ripples deliberately does not do
Session replay	No	Yes
Heatmaps	No	Yes
Feature flags and A/B tests	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Self-hostable	No	Yes

Prices and features change. If you find a row here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it: a comparison page nobody can trust is worth less to us than no page at all.

The real difference

Umami now credits revenue to a referrer. It still cannot see your billing.

We are not going to argue that you should pay $9 a month for what Umami gives you for nothing. If your question is how many people visited and where they came from, Umami answers it, the code is open, and you can run it yourself for the cost of a small server.

Umami now has a revenue view, and it does break revenue down by referrer and channel, so the older version of this comparison, which said Umami could not connect money to a source, was out of date the day they shipped it. The catch is where the money comes from. Umami learns about a payment only when your own code fires an event carrying it. The first checkout is a one-line call. The second month of a subscription is a cron job you write and then own, and nothing reconciles the total against what your billing provider actually settled.

The other half is missing outright. There is no ad platform connection, so spend never enters the picture, and with no spend there is no payback period and no ROAS. Umami can tell you Reddit produced $450. It cannot tell you what the search traffic sitting above it in the same list cost you to buy.

A reasonable way to think about it: Umami replaces Google Analytics, Ripples replaces the spreadsheet where you try to reconcile Stripe against Google Ads by hand.

Umami revenue screen showing total revenue, average order value, ARPU, orders and unique customers above an hourly revenue chart, with a Sources panel crediting revenue by referrer: google.com $600.00, reddit.com $450.00, chatgpt.com $360.00 and github.com $310.00. The left sidebar groups UTM, Revenue and Attribution under a Growth heading. — Umami live demo, revenue view, captured 14 August 2026. Not a mock.

Being straight with you

Pick Umami instead if any of this is you.

We would rather you found out here than after installing.

You want free, permanently

Umami Cloud is free at 100,000 events a month and self-hosting is free at any volume. That is a real answer, not a trial.

You want to own it

MIT licensed, run it anywhere, no vendor in the middle. If data ownership is the requirement, that is the end of the discussion.

Traffic is the whole question

If there is no recurring revenue to attribute, everything Ripples adds is machinery you are not using.

You already self-host things

If you have a server and a Postgres already running, Umami is close to free to add.

There is a longer list of things Ripples deliberately does not do on what we don't do.

Questions

Ripples and Umami, asked plainly.

Is Umami really free?

Yes, in both forms. Umami is MIT licensed so self-hosting is free at any volume, and Umami Cloud has a free tier at 100,000 events a month, with Pro at around $20 a month for 1 million events.

Does Umami track revenue?

Yes, with the caveat that decides whether it is useful to you. Umami has a revenue view that breaks revenue down by referrer and channel. The numbers in it only exist for payments your own code reported through their tracker, because there is no Stripe or Paddle connection: renewals, refunds and failed payments do not arrive on their own, and nothing reconciles the total against what your billing provider settled.

What is the best Umami alternative?

Plausible if you want the same open-source privacy-first shape with a more polished product. Ripples if you need revenue, ad spend and retention by channel. Google Analytics if you need free at a much larger scale and do not mind the configuration.

Can I run Ripples alongside Umami?

Yes. Keep Umami for traffic if you like it, add Ripples for the revenue and payback view. Two script tags, no conflict.

Sources

Checked August 2026. Umami is a trademark of its owner and is not affiliated with Ripples. We take no affiliate commission from anyone on this page.