It has nothing to do with food, since umami comes from Japanese and is generally translated as “tasty”. It is one of the five basic flavors with sweet, sour, bitter and salty. See Wikipedia.
If you have a website, there are two heavyweights to track your traffic: Google Analytics and its best known open source alternative, Matomo.
However, if you don’t want to use either of them for privacy reasons or because they are too heavy, you can opt for Umami.
Umami is an open source statistics tool, simple, light and self-hosted. As respectful of visitors and their data as Matomo can be.
The idea is to collect only the interesting data for the one who wants to follow the frequentation of his site at a glance: how many visitors, their provenance, the pages seen; without going into advanced considerations often reserved for large sites. In short, Umami is a good alternative to Google Analytics and Matomo on the segment of “small” websites.
In its documentation Umami announces the following features:
- Simple analytics
- Unlimited websites
- Bypass ad-blockers
- Light-weight
- Multiple accounts
- Share data
- Mobile-friendly
- Data ownership
- Privacy-focused
- Open-source
A live demo exists, and it will be much more eloquent to get an idea.
For the installation Umami requires NodeJS 12 and a database (postgresql or mysql), otherwise you can also simply launch a docker container. See the official documentation.
I also invite you to read this article from the creator “How I Wrote Umami in 30 Days“.
