Medama Analytics

Self-hosted privacy analytics, honestly reviewed. Lightweight, no cookies, and simpler to deploy than anything else in this category.

TL;DR

• What it is: Open-source, cookie-free website analytics you self-host on your own server — no cookies, no IP logging, no consent banners required [README].
• Who it’s for: Founders and site owners who want to drop Google Analytics (and its consent headache) without paying $9–14/mo for Plausible or Fathom.
• Cost savings: Plausible starts at ~$9/mo for 10K pageviews. Medama on a $4 VPS costs $4/mo with no pageview limits [README].
• Key strength: A tracker under 1KB with zero external dependencies, single-binary deployment, and runs on a server with 256MB RAM — the lightest footprint in its category [README].
• Key weakness: 609 GitHub stars at time of review — a small, early-stage project with limited third-party reviews and a narrower feature set than Plausible or Umami. You’re betting on a project that hasn’t yet proven longevity.

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What is Medama Analytics

Medama Analytics is a self-hosted website analytics platform built around one constraint: collecting no personally identifiable information. No cookies. No IP addresses. No fingerprinting. You get pageview counts, referrers, browser language, and device type — but nothing that identifies individual users [README].

The project describes itself plainly: “Self-hostable, cookie-free website analytics.” That’s it. No “AI-powered insights” tagline, no growth platform pitch — just an analytics tool that tells you where your traffic comes from and what pages people visit, without requiring a GDPR consent popup to do it [README][website].

What makes the technical approach interesting: the tracking script weighs less than 1KB [README]. For context, Google Analytics (gtag.js) weighs around 45–80KB depending on configuration. Even Plausible’s script — already considered lightweight — is around 1KB gzipped but with more overhead uncompressed. Medama has made the tracker size a first-class constraint rather than an afterthought [README].

The server side runs as a single binary with no external dependencies. You don’t need PostgreSQL, Redis, or a separate database server. For small websites, it runs comfortably on a VPS with 256MB RAM [README]. That’s genuinely unusual in this category — Matomo requires PHP + MySQL, Plausible requires Elixir + Postgres + Clickhouse, Umami requires Node + Postgres.

The project is dual-licensed: the core server and dashboard are Apache License 2.0, and the tracker script itself is MIT [README]. Both are permissive — you can self-host, fork, and embed commercially without restrictions.

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Why people choose it

Third-party reviews of Medama Analytics are not available at time of writing — the project’s 609 GitHub stars and recent emergence means it hasn’t yet attracted the coverage that Plausible, Umami, or Matomo have. What follows draws on the project’s own documentation and stated positioning [README][website].

The choice to deploy Medama typically comes down to one of three frustrations:

Google Analytics compliance fatigue. GA4 requires a consent banner in the EU under GDPR, and under PECR in the UK, because it uses cookies and sends data to Google’s servers in the US. A properly implemented consent banner typically drops measured traffic by 20–40% — visitors who decline tracking disappear from your data. Cookie-free analytics like Medama avoids this entirely: because no PII is collected, no consent is needed in most EU jurisdictions [website].

Plausible/Fathom pricing at scale. Both are excellent products, but they’re usage-based SaaS: Plausible charges ~$9/mo for 10K monthly pageviews, $19/mo for 100K, $69/mo for 1M. Fathom starts at $14/mo. For a founder running several low-traffic sites or one high-traffic site, those bills compound. Medama self-hosted on a shared $4–6/mo VPS has no pageview ceiling.

Matomo complexity aversion. Matomo is the feature-complete self-hosted analytics option, but it comes with that complexity: PHP, MySQL, a plugin ecosystem, and a UI that looks like it was designed to mirror every GA feature rather than to be simple. Medama trades feature depth for operational simplicity [website].

What Medama doesn’t offer a compelling answer to: if you’re moving from GA specifically because you want more data (conversion funnels, ecommerce tracking, heatmaps, A/B testing), Medama isn’t the answer. It covers the basics and stops there deliberately.

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Features

Based on the official documentation and README [README][website]:

Core tracking:

• Page view tracking enabled by default when you add the snippet [website]
• Captures: page URL, referrer URL, browser language, device type [website]
• Real-time data display [README]
• Custom properties — extend tracking with your own key-value metadata [website]

Privacy architecture:

• No cookies set
• No IP addresses stored
• No additional fingerprinting identifiers
• Stated GDPR and PECR compliance [README]
• Tracker script under 1KB [README]

Infrastructure:

• Single binary deployment, no external service dependencies [README]
• Runs on 256MB RAM for small sites [README]
• OpenAPI-based server — documented API for integrating into your own dashboards [README][website]

What’s missing (compared to Plausible or Umami):

• No goal/conversion tracking documented
• No funnel analysis
• No ecommerce tracking
• No team/multi-user access controls visible in documentation
• No public roadmap for upcoming features

The feature set is intentionally minimal. The demo dashboard at demo.medama.io shows a clean single-page view: traffic over time, top pages, referrer sources, browser and device breakdowns. If you’ve used Plausible, you’ll recognize the pattern. If you came from GA4 expecting segments, attribution modeling, and custom reports, you’ll find Medama underwhelming — and that’s by design.

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Pricing: SaaS vs self-hosted math

Medama is self-hosted only — there is no managed cloud tier at time of writing [README][website]. The cost is entirely your infrastructure.

Self-hosting Medama:

• Software: $0 (Apache 2.0 / MIT) [README]
• Smallest viable server: $4–6/mo VPS (e.g., Hetzner CX11 at 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM — well above the 256MB minimum)
• Domain: if you already have one, $0 additional
• Total: $4–6/mo, unlimited pageviews

Alternatives for comparison:

Option	Monthly cost	Pageview limit	Data location
Medama (self-hosted)	$4–6 (VPS)	Unlimited	Your server
Plausible Cloud	$9–$69+	10K–1M	EU servers
Fathom	$14–$54+	100K–1M	CDN
Umami Cloud	$9+	10K+	Their servers
Google Analytics	$0	Unlimited	Google (US)
Matomo (self-hosted)	$4–10 (VPS)	Unlimited	Your server

For a single site under moderate traffic, the self-hosting math is clear: you save $9–14/mo versus Plausible/Fathom from month one. Across 12 months, that’s $108–$168/year — not life-changing, but also not nothing for a bootstrapped founder watching every line item.

The more interesting comparison is Medama vs. self-hosted Umami or Matomo. Umami requires Node.js and PostgreSQL — you’ll need a beefier VPS (~$6–10/mo) and more setup time. Matomo is heavier still. Medama’s single-binary, 256MB requirement means it can run cheaply alongside other services on a shared VPS without eating your resources.

What’s absent from the pricing picture: there’s no commercial support contract, no enterprise tier, and no managed hosting option currently. If something breaks, you’re debugging it yourself or posting in the Discord [website]. For a solo founder who deploys it and forgets it, fine. For a business that needs uptime SLAs, look at Plausible Cloud or Fathom.

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Deployment reality check

The single-binary approach is Medama’s clearest practical advantage over competitors. From the documentation [README][website]:

What you need:

• A Linux server (256MB RAM minimum — a $4 Hetzner VPS is more than enough)
• The Medama binary (downloaded or compiled)
• A domain and reverse proxy (Caddy is simplest) for HTTPS
• The tracking snippet added to your site’s HTML

What you don’t need:

• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Node.js runtime
• PHP
• Docker (though Docker deployment is also documented)

The install documentation at oss.medama.io covers the process and is reasonably complete for a small project [website]. Realistic time estimate: 15–30 minutes for a technical user familiar with a Linux server. For a non-technical founder following a guide step by step: 60–90 minutes including domain configuration.

For context: self-hosting Plausible via Docker requires managing a multi-container setup (Elixir app, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse). Self-hosting Matomo requires a LAMP/LEMP stack. Medama is genuinely simpler than both.

The tracker snippet itself is under 1KB, so adding it to your site means dropping one script tag — no tag manager required, no performance concern [README].

What could go wrong:

• Documentation is thin in places — this is a small project and the docs don’t yet cover every edge case.
• If you run a high-traffic site (millions of pageviews), you’re in undocumented territory for the single-binary’s performance ceiling. The 256MB claim is explicitly for “most small websites” [README].
• No third-party deployment guides exist yet. You’re on the official docs and Discord.
• Long-term maintenance risk: 609 GitHub stars is small. If the maintainer loses interest, you inherit the codebase. Plausible and Umami have much larger communities behind them.

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Pros and cons

Pros

• Genuinely cookie-free by architecture, not by policy. No cookies are set — this isn’t a configuration option you can accidentally break [README].
• GDPR/PECR compliant without consent banners in most EU/UK jurisdictions, because no PII is collected. This alone eliminates the 20–40% traffic loss that cookie consent banners cause [README].
• Lightest deployment in the category. Single binary, 256MB RAM, no database dependencies. Simpler than any comparable tool [README].
• Sub-1KB tracker script. Minimal page weight impact compared to GA4 or even Plausible [README].
• OpenAPI-based server — documented REST API for pulling data into your own dashboards or tools [README][website].
• Permissive dual license (Apache 2.0 + MIT) — use it commercially, fork it, embed it. No commercial licensing restrictions [README].
• Free demo at demo.medama.io — you can evaluate the actual dashboard before deploying anything [website].

Cons

• Small project. 609 stars at time of review. Plausible has 20K+, Umami has 24K+. Longevity risk is real — this isn’t a project with 100 contributors [README].
• Thin feature set. No goal tracking, funnels, ecommerce events, or team management visible in current documentation [website].
• No managed hosting option. If you want privacy-respecting analytics without self-hosting, Plausible and Fathom have you covered. Medama doesn’t [website].
• No third-party reviews. Independent coverage is essentially zero at this point — you’re going on the documentation and demo rather than community validation.
• Uncertain performance ceiling. The 256MB/small-sites framing doesn’t tell you what happens at 500K pageviews/month on modest hardware [README].
• No commercial support. The community is Discord-only. If your instance breaks on a Friday night, there’s no support contract to call [website].
• Documentation gaps. The docs cover the basics but lack depth on configuration, tuning, and production hardening.

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Who should use this / who shouldn’t

Use Medama if:

• You’re running one or several small-to-medium sites and paying $9–14/mo per site on Plausible or Fathom — the math favors self-hosting.
• Your primary motivation is removing cookie consent banners without sacrificing EU compliance.
• You want the absolute simplest self-hosted analytics deployment — one binary, no stack.
• You’re comfortable with minimal tooling and don’t need funnels, goals, or ecommerce tracking.
• You have access to a Linux VPS (even a $4 one) and can drop a script tag in your site’s HTML.

Skip it (use Plausible Cloud) if:

• You want cookie-free, privacy-respecting analytics without touching a server. Plausible is the polished, well-supported SaaS option with a strong reputation.
• You need goal and conversion tracking beyond basic pageviews.
• You need multi-user team access or per-site permissions.
• You want a project with 20K+ stars, active community, and a company behind it.

Skip it (use Umami) if:

• You want self-hosted, open-source analytics with a larger community (24K+ stars) and more features including goals and events.
• You’re comfortable with Node + Postgres deployment.

Skip it (use Matomo) if:

• You need full GA-equivalent feature depth: funnels, segments, heatmaps, ecommerce, A/B testing.
• Your organization requires certified compliance documentation and paid support contracts.

Skip it (stay on GA4) if:

• You need demographic data, attribution modeling, or integration with Google Ads.
• Your audience is outside the EU/UK and you don’t have privacy compliance constraints.

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Alternatives worth considering

• Plausible Analytics — the benchmark for privacy-friendly analytics. Cookie-free, GDPR-compliant, polished UI, Plausible Cloud or self-hosted. 20K+ stars, active development, company-backed. Self-hosted requires more infrastructure than Medama.
• Umami — open-source, self-hosted, 24K+ stars. Supports goals/events, multi-site, team access. Requires Node.js + PostgreSQL.
• Fathom Analytics — commercial SaaS only ($14/mo+), privacy-focused, no self-hosting. Polished and well-regarded.
• GoatCounter — minimalist, open-source, very lightweight. Closer in spirit to Medama. Self-hosted or managed at low cost.
• Matomo — full-featured, self-hosted, open-source equivalent to GA4. Apache 2.0. Much heavier stack.
• Pirsch Analytics — commercial SaaS, privacy-focused, German company.
• PostHog — open-source product analytics (events, funnels, session replay, feature flags). Much heavier and broader scope than pure pageview analytics.

For a non-technical founder escaping GA4’s consent overhead, the practical shortlist is Plausible vs. Medama. Plausible if you want hands-off simplicity and don’t mind the monthly bill. Medama if you want to eliminate that bill and the deployment simplicity is genuinely appealing.

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Bottom line

Medama Analytics is the most deployment-friendly option in the cookie-free analytics category right now. One binary, no database stack, 256MB RAM, and a tracker that adds less weight to your pages than most favicon files. The privacy compliance case is solid: no cookies, no IPs, no consent banner required. For founders paying $9–14/mo per site on Plausible or Fathom and running multiple properties, the math on a $4–6 VPS is straightforward.

The honest caveat is that you’re adopting early. With 609 stars and no major third-party coverage, Medama hasn’t yet earned the trust that Plausible or Umami have accumulated over years of community use. If you need a project you can rely on for five years with a community to fall back on, Plausible self-hosted or Umami are safer bets. If you’re comfortable with a lean, well-designed tool from a small project and you value operational simplicity above all, Medama is worth the 30-minute deploy.

If the deployment itself is the blocker, it’s exactly the kind of one-time setup that upready.dev handles for clients.

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Sources

1. Medama Analytics — GitHub README (medama-io/medama). https://github.com/medama-io/medama
2. Medama Analytics — Official Documentation (oss.medama.io). https://oss.medama.io/introduction
3. Medama Analytics — Live Demo Dashboard. https://demo.medama.io

Note: No independent third-party reviews of Medama Analytics were available at time of publication. The tool’s small community footprint (609 GitHub stars) means this article draws primarily from first-party sources. Readers are encouraged to evaluate the live demo before deploying.