Mrkr vs Umami.
Umami is MIT-licensed and free on your own server. Mrkr is hosted, proprietary, and does more once it is running. The honest question is whether you want to operate an analytics server at all.
What is the difference between Mrkr and Umami?
Umami is MIT-licensed cookieless analytics you can self-host for free, covering pageviews, sources, events, and funnels. Mrkr is a hosted proprietary product that adds session replay, cohorts, retention, and revenue attribution, cookieless by default. Umami gives you ownership of the software. Mrkr gives you capability without operations.
If the licence is the point, this comparison is already decided. Umami is MIT, Mrkr is closed source and hosted only, and no feature list changes that. What follows is for readers who are weighing the running cost against what the extra features are worth.
What the subscription actually buys.
Session replay, cohorts and retention, per-visitor timelines, revenue attribution, Core Web Vitals, a managed first-party proxy, and the absence of a database to back up. Whether that is worth a monthly fee is a genuine judgement call.
Where Mrkr is better.
Replay, cohorts, revenue
Umami counts and segments well. It records no sessions and attributes no revenue.
Nothing to keep alive
No Postgres, no upgrades, no outage that leaves a gap you cannot backfill.
Adblock resistance, managed
The tracker serves from your own subdomain. On Umami that is a reverse proxy to maintain.
Bots separated and shown
One live Mrkr site logged 2,946 human pageviews against 12,146 filtered bot hits.
Side by side.
| Mrkr | Umami | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Privacy analytics with replay | Privacy analytics |
| Session replay | Yes, on every paid plan | No |
| Heatmaps | No | No |
| Funnels | Yes | Yes |
| Cohorts and retention | Yes | No |
| Revenue attribution | Yes | Goal revenue only |
| Cookieless | Yes by default, cookie mode optional per site | Yes |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes |
| Free plan | No, 14-day trial | Free forever if you host it yourself |
| Entry paid price | $5/mo, 100K pageviews, session replay included | Free self-hosted, paid cloud, Self-host at your own cost, or a hosted plan |
| Licence | Proprietary, hosted only | MIT, open source |
| Server to operate | None | Yours, if you self-host |
| Per-visitor session detail | Yes | Limited |
| Per-visitor timeline | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals | Yes | No |
| First-party proxy on your own subdomain | Yes, managed | Yours to configure |
Umami details checked against the vendor's own pricing and feature pages on 2026-08-24. Where a vendor does not publish a fixed list price, this table says how they charge rather than guessing a number. Vendors change packaging often, so confirm before you buy.
Try the hosted version
The live demo is the full Mrkr product on real data, with no signup and no server to stand up first.
Open the live demo
Where Umami is genuinely better.
You own the software
MIT licensed, so you can fork it and run it forever with no vendor in the loop.
Free at any volume
Self-hosted Umami has no per-event bill. It costs the price of a server.
Your data on your disk
The database is yours, queryable with SQL, and never leaves your infrastructure.
Lightweight and pleasant
Small, quick to deploy, and it does not sprawl. One of the easiest to live with.
Questions, answered.
Keep reading
- Mrkr vs Plausible
The other open-source cookieless comparison.
- Mrkr vs Matomo
The heavier self-hostable option.
- Nine Google Analytics alternatives
Where Umami sits in the wider field.
- Analytics that survive adblockers
What the managed proxy does.
- How analytics works without cookies
The counting method both tools use.
- Open the live demo
No install, no server.
Your first visitor is already here.
Drop in the script and watch them land. It takes about a minute.