Fulcrum
Fulcrum is consolidating on Esri, with Google Maps gone September 1
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Hex and Umami — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
| Feature | Hex | Umami |
|---|---|---|
| Sector | Analytics | Analytics |
| Velocity score | 6.3 | 0.0 |
| Sparks · 30d | 1 | 0 |
| Top themes | agents, cli, mcp, model-routing | web analytics, session replay, dashboards, security patches |
| Last editorial update | 19h ago | 12d ago |
| Website | — | Visit → |
Hex is moving its agent out of the notebook and onto programmable surfaces.
Hex ships a fortnightly digest, and the through-line across the last ten is agent reach. The agent now runs from a CLI and API, appears inside Codex, acts as an MCP client against the user's own apps, can search the web, and can see the generative apps it builds. Alongside that, the model layer has become a customer-facing control: a picker, an admin-set default, Auto with visible attribution, and a rotating roster including Fable 5, Kimi K2.7, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6.
Umami spent late 2025 patching Next.js CVEs, then shipped Boards and Session Replay in v3.1.0.
The window splits sharply. Four of six releases are December 2025 patches across the v2 and v3 lines, all responding to the same Next.js and React security advisories plus Docker build breakage — several shipped within days of each other because the first fix updated Next.js without the affected React versions. Then v3.1.0 in April 2026 delivered custom dashboards as Boards, Session Replay, Web Vitals performance tracking, a redesigned share page, and a large batch of fixes.
Hex ships a fortnightly digest, and the through-line across the last ten is agent reach. The agent now runs from a CLI and API, appears inside Codex, acts as an MCP client against the user's own apps, can search the web, and can see the generative apps it builds. Alongside that, the model layer has become a customer-facing control: a picker, an admin-set default, Auto with visible attribution, and a rotating roster including Fable 5, Kimi K2.7, Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6.
Hex is positioning the agent as a component other systems call rather than a feature users visit. Governance is being built out in parallel — spend limits, credit usage controls, enterprise role-request controls, signed embedding — which is the pattern of a product preparing for programmatic usage it does not directly supervise. The generative-app surface is drifting the same way, from generated output toward editable, brandable, embeddable artifacts.
Expect the CLI and API surface to deepen before the notebook UI gains much, with more of Context Studio and app management reachable programmatically, and expect the spend and role controls to keep pace as headless usage grows.
The window splits sharply. Four of six releases are December 2025 patches across the v2 and v3 lines, all responding to the same Next.js and React security advisories plus Docker build breakage — several shipped within days of each other because the first fix updated Next.js without the affected React versions. Then v3.1.0 in April 2026 delivered custom dashboards as Boards, Session Replay, Web Vitals performance tracking, a redesigned share page, and a large batch of fixes.
The security cluster is a framework dependency showing its cost — an analytics tool inheriting its release schedule from Next.js advisories. v3.1.0 is where product work resumes, and its content is telling: Session Replay and Web Vitals move Umami past pageview counting into behaviour and performance, which is the territory occupied by heavier commercial analytics rather than the lightweight privacy-first tools it grew up alongside.
Expect the next releases to build on Boards and Session Replay rather than return to the counting core, since both are new surfaces that arrived with a single release and no follow-up yet.
Other Analytics products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Hex or Umami.
Fulcrum is consolidating on Esri, with Google Maps gone September 1
Omni ships weekly, and almost every week the headline item is an AI feature
Four ODD Platform releases in two weeks, and not one of them changes the product
Baremaps got geoparquet and hillshading, then went quiet for eighteen months in incubation
Deequ ships GitHub tags whose release notes are one commit message long
Marquez spent 2024 turning a lineage store into a UI, then stopped releasing
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Hex is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Hex is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 6.3 vs 0.0), with 1 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Analytics products to evaluate alongside.
Top Hex alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Hex alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/hex for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
Top Umami alternatives in Analytics are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Umami alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/umami for the full list with editorial commentary on each.