HitKeep vs Umami

HitKeep and Umami are both MIT-licensed, cookie-less, self-hosted analytics tools. This is an honest comparison, including where Umami is ahead.

Feature Comparison

Feature	HitKeep	Umami
Self-hosted	✓	✓
Single binary	✓	✗
External database required	None	PostgreSQL or MySQL
Cookie-less by default	✓	✓
Open source	✓ MIT	✓ MIT
Goals / conversions	✓	✓ (Events)
Funnels	✓	✓
UTM tracking	✓	✓
Custom events	✓	✓
Email reports	✓	✗
Shareable dashboards	✓	✓
TOTP 2FA	✓	✓
Passkeys (WebAuthn)	✓	✗
No third-party frontend requests	✓	✓
Zero telemetry / phone-home	✓	✓
Air-gap compatible	✓	✗
API clients (bearer tokens)	✓	✓
RBAC / team roles	✓	✓
IP exclusions	✓	✓
Data takeout (export)	✓	✓
Clustering / HA	✓ (Memberlist)	✗
Ecommerce / revenue tracking	✗	✓
Custom event properties	✗	✓
Advanced filtering / segments	✗	✓
Heatmaps	✗	✗
Session recordings	✗	✗
Mobile SDK	✗	✓
Cloud managed	Coming soon	✓ (Umami Cloud)

What HitKeep Is Missing

Ecommerce / revenue tracking — Umami v2 supports attaching revenue values to events, enabling purchase and subscription tracking with monetary reporting. HitKeep tracks events but has no revenue or ecommerce dimension. This is on the roadmap.

Custom event properties — Umami lets you attach arbitrary data properties to events (e.g. {plan: "pro", country: "DE"}) and filter/group by them in the dashboard. HitKeep supports event names only; custom properties are planned.

Advanced filtering and segments — Umami’s dashboard supports multi-dimensional filtering and saved segments. HitKeep’s current filtering covers time range and standard dimensions; richer segmentation is on the roadmap.

Mobile SDK — Umami has an official React Native SDK. HitKeep currently has a web-only tracking snippet (hk.js). Mobile app tracking support is planned.

More polished UI/UX — Umami has been iterated over many versions and has a very refined, fast interface. HitKeep’s dashboard is functional but newer.

Larger community — Umami has significantly more GitHub stars, tutorials, and third-party integration guides. HitKeep is newer.

Managed cloud today — Umami Cloud is a running product. HitKeep Cloud is in development; join the waitlist →.

Architecture

HitKeep

A single Go binary with embedded DuckDB (OLAP) and NSQ (queue):

./hitkeep -public-url="https://analytics.example.com" -jwt-secret="..."
# No database server. No Node runtime. No npm.

One file to back up: hitkeep.db.

Umami

A Next.js/Node.js application:

Requires PostgreSQL or MySQL running externally
Deployed via Docker Compose or a Node.js process
Requires Node.js 18+ on the host

Umami’s stack is familiar to frontend-focused teams and has a large ecosystem of tutorials.

Resource Usage

	HitKeep	Umami
Minimum RAM	~64 MB	~256 MB+ (Node + database)
Runtime required	None (static binary)	Node.js 18+
Suitable for	Any VPS, ARM, Raspberry Pi	Standard VPS or Docker host

When to Choose HitKeep

You want one binary, zero runtime dependencies, one file to back up
You need air-gap compatible analytics
You need WebAuthn/Passkey hardware security key support
You need built-in HA clustering for high-availability
You’re running on resource-constrained hardware (ARM, low RAM)
You don’t require ecommerce tracking or mobile SDK

When to Choose Umami

You need ecommerce / revenue tracking today
You need custom event properties and rich filtering
You want a mobile SDK for native app tracking
You want a managed cloud option available now
Your team is comfortable with Node.js/TypeScript
You prioritize a larger community and more third-party integrations

Security & Third-Party Requests

Both serve dashboard assets from the self-hosted instance. HitKeep additionally proxies favicons server-side, emits zero telemetry, and is fully air-gap compatible.

See Security Overview →

Ready to try HitKeep? Get started in 2 minutes →

Prefer managed? Join the HitKeep Cloud waitlist →