Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Umami vs Google Analytics 4 vs Microsoft Clarity

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Umami (umami)
- URL: https://umami.is
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: mixed — Free Hobby: 100K events/mo, 3 sites, 6-month retention. Pro $20/mo for 1M events and 20 sites. Business $200/mo for 10M. Self-hosting free.
- What it is: An MIT-licensed cookieless analytics app you can run on your own Postgres or MySQL server, or use as a hosted cloud service. It tracks pageviews, referrers, custom events and simple funnels. Because it stores no personal data and sets no cookies, no consent banner is required.
- Why builders pick it: The most permissively licensed option on this list. MIT means you can fork it, rebrand it and run it on a $5 VPS forever, and the cloud free tier is genuinely usable.
- Trap: Self-hosting means you own upgrades, backups and a Postgres table that grows fast with event volume. Cloud Hobby retention is only 6 months and the next step up is a $20/mo jump.
- Wiring: docker run -d -p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/umami-software/umami:postgresql-latest
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/umami

## Google Analytics 4 (google-analytics-4)
- URL: https://analytics.google.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free for standard properties at essentially any volume. GA4 360 historically starts around $50,000/yr.
- What it is: Google's event-based analytics platform, free for standard properties, with audiences, attribution modelling, Search Console linking and a daily BigQuery export capped at 1M events. Standard properties allow 50 event-scoped custom dimensions and 30 key events. Cloud-only, with no self-hosted equivalent.
- Why builders pick it: It costs nothing at any traffic level and it is still what advertisers, SEO tools and clients expect to see, so it often ends up running alongside a nicer tool rather than instead of one.
- Trap: Retention maxes at 14 months (default 2) and explorations sample above 10M events per query. EU traffic needs a consent banner plus Consent Mode v2, and several EU regulators have ruled plain GA deployments unlawful without extra safeguards.
- Wiring: npm i @next/third-parties
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/google-analytics-4

## Microsoft Clarity (microsoft-clarity)
- URL: https://clarity.microsoft.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free forever with no traffic limits and no paid tier.
- What it is: Microsoft's free behavioural analytics tool offering unlimited session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, rage-click and dead-click detection, and AI summaries of sessions. There are no traffic caps and no paid upgrade path. Cloud-only, with an optional Google Analytics integration.
- Why builders pick it: Unlimited free session replay is unmatched at any price. Watching ten real people fumble your onboarding teaches you more in an hour than a month of staring at funnel charts.
- Trap: It sets the _clck and _clsk cookies, and since 31 October 2025 Clarity requires a valid consent signal for EEA, UK and Swiss visitors, so without a CMP those sessions will not record. Recordings can capture PII unless you mask fields.
- Wiring: npm i @microsoft/clarity
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/microsoft-clarity

## Quick read

- Free with no card: Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity.

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=umami,google-analytics-4,microsoft-clarity