# fivebar vs Umami

Umami has more reports, and costs less up to a few million pageviews. fivebar shows the bots and errors it left out, lets an app act for you, and keeps less about each visitor.

Umami does a great deal: funnels, journeys, revenue, Core Web Vitals, an MCP server, and on its Business plan, heatmaps and session replays. It’s [free to run yourself](https://github.com/umami-software/umami), and [free on its own cloud](https://umami.is/pricing) up to 100,000 events a month for one site.

## The bots it left out

Umami checks each hit’s user agent against a list of bots and drops what matches, with [nothing kept](https://github.com/umami-software/umami/blob/master/src/app/api/send/route.ts) to say it did. fivebar counts everything it leaves out on a [Bots page](https://fiveb.ar/docs/bots.md): how many pageviews, which pages, which networks, and why each was taken for a bot, whether it named itself or came from a server. When a visit of your own goes missing, that’s where to look.

![fivebar’s Bots page for djangodocs.dev: 94 pageviews taken for bots, 30% of them all, by day, and why: a hosting network, an automated browser or a crawler](https://fiveb.ar/img/vs/bots-light.webp?v=af2f5515)

Nearly a third of djangodocs.dev’s pageviews that week were bots’, most of them from servers.

## Pages that fail

Umami has no report of pages that fail: a 404 is counted as a page like any other, unless you send it as an [event of your own](https://umami.is/docs/track-events). Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so the [Errors page](https://fiveb.ar/docs/error-pages.md) fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from. Safari needs one attribute on your error pages’ template. Error pages are never billed.

![fivebar’s Errors page for djangodocs.dev: 33 errors on 31 pages, a 15% error rate, each a 404, by day, status, source and device](https://fiveb.ar/img/vs/errors-light.webp?v=24e534e6)

djangodocs.dev answered 33 page loads with a 404 that week, nearly all of them on one Saturday.

## An app that can act

Both have an MCP server. [Umami’s](https://umami.is/docs/mcp) reads, and changes nothing. An app reaches it with an [API key](https://umami.is/docs/cloud/mcp) in a header, from the Pro plan up.

[fivebar’s](https://fiveb.ar/docs/mcp.md) is added by its address alone, on every plan: the app opens fivebar for you to sign in and choose Allow, and there’s no key to copy. Tick a box as you do, and the app adds goals, site search and excluded traffic, or turns your email reports on, when you ask it to.

## Less about each visitor

Umami can [record sessions to replay](https://umami.is/docs/replays), link a signed-in person’s visits across their devices with [distinct IDs](https://umami.is/docs/distinct-ids), and show each visitor’s activity in [a profile](https://umami.is/docs/sessions). fivebar keeps counts, by site and day: so many pageviews of a page, from a country, in a browser, and [never a record of what one visitor did](https://fiveb.ar/privacy/index.md).

Its visitors differ too. Umami counts a visitor once in a calendar month, by a [salt that changes each month](https://umami.is/docs/metric-definitions). fivebar counts a visitor once a day, so its visitors over a month are [visitor-days](https://fiveb.ar/docs/metrics.md), and come out higher wherever people come back.

## Where your stats are kept

Umami Software is [a company registered in Delaware](https://umami.is/terms), and its cloud keeps an account’s stats [in the US or the EU](https://umami.is/docs/cloud/sign-up), chosen as it signs up. Most of the [companies it uses](https://umami.is/subprocessors), Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare among them, are American. Nothing fivebar keeps is at rest outside the EU, or on a US company’s server, and your stats are on its servers in Germany, at Hetzner ([Infrastructure](https://fiveb.ar/docs/infrastructure.md)). Umami [keeps a site’s stats](https://umami.is/pricing) for 6 months on Hobby, 2 years on Pro and 5 on Business; fivebar keeps them until you delete the site.

## Prices

Umami is cheaper up to a few million pageviews, and fivebar from 5M up. Umami’s limits are in events, and [each property](https://umami.is/pricing) an event stores counts as one more, as does session data. Pro holds 20 sites and Business any number; fivebar holds 1,024.

| Pageviews a month | fivebar | Umami |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 10k | $5 | $0 on Hobby, one site |
| 100k | $13 | $0 on Hobby, one site |
| 1M | $50 | $20 on Pro |
| 10M | $165 | $200 on Business |
| 50M | $650 | $1,000 on Business |

A month, in US dollars, from [fivebar’s prices](https://fiveb.ar/pricing/index.md) and [Umami’s](https://umami.is/pricing), which charges $30 a million past Pro’s first and $20 a million past Business’s first ten.

## What Umami has that fivebar doesn’t

- **Reports**: [funnels](https://umami.is/docs/funnel), [journeys](https://umami.is/docs/journey), [retention](https://umami.is/docs/retention), [attribution](https://umami.is/docs/attribution), [revenue](https://umami.is/docs/revenue), and [segments](https://umami.is/docs/segments) and [cohorts](https://umami.is/docs/cohorts) to cut them by.
- **[Heatmaps](https://umami.is/docs/heatmaps)** and session replays, on Business in its cloud, and when you run it yourself.
- **Self-hosting**: Umami is [open source](https://github.com/umami-software/umami), under the MIT licence, to run on your own server.
- **[Boards](https://umami.is/docs/using-boards)**, dashboards of your own making.
- **[A free plan](https://umami.is/pricing)**, for one site up to 100,000 events a month.

## Switching

[Add fivebar’s tag](https://fiveb.ar/docs/install.md) beside Umami’s, and run both for a few weeks, so you have both counts for the same days before you take Umami’s out. A button with `data-umami-event="Signup"` takes [`data-tally="Signup"`](https://fiveb.ar/docs/events.md), and its `data-umami-event-` attributes become `data-tally-` ones. Where your pages call `umami.track()` with an event’s name, call `tally()` with the same name and data.

Checked on 19 October 2026, on Umami’s own pages and code, each linked where it’s used.