Hum

Key Features

• •Hum's unique visitor counters track distinct individuals across repeat visits using server-side deduplication, ensuring accurate counts without relying on cookies. This privacy-friendly approach allows websites to display a running total of lifetime visitors, giving new users immediate social proof of the site's popularity and longevity.
• •Hum's live right now widgets leverage WebSockets to provide realtime visibility into who is currently on your site. The count updates the moment someone arrives or departs, dynamically reflecting activity. This feature is ideal for product launches, where a rising live number signals momentum and encourages conversions. The widget's live breathing effect adds a human touch, transforming static pages into lively experiences.
• •Hum's page view badges include sparkline charts that illustrate traffic trends over time, delta indicators showing percentage changes compared to previous periods, and trend insights for quick performance assessment. Each badge is tied to a specific page, allowing detailed tracking per URL. This feature is especially useful for blog posts and documentation, as it both informs readers of content popularity and equips creators with actionable data to optimize their content strategy.
• •Hum offers over 50 templates spanning categories like Minimal, Terminal, Glass, Neon, Retro, Compact, Floating, Brutalist, Editorial, Playful, Dashboard, Animated, and Modern. Each template is a real, live widget that updates in realtime. Developers can customize appearance using attributes for size, mode (light/dark/adaptive), and label. The playground lets users test combinations and copy the exact tag, making it easy to find the perfect look for any website.
• •Installing Hum requires just one script tag placed in your site's head. The platform automatically detects your frontend framework—whether React, Next.js, Remix, Astro, Vite, Gatsby, or plain HTML—and adapts accordingly. All realtime synchronization, visitor deduplication, and analytics processing occur on Hum's edge servers, so you don't need any backend code. The entire embed is under 22KB minified and tree-shakeable, ensuring minimal performance impact.
• •Hum's realtime sync operates over its edge infrastructure, ensuring that visitor counts update instantly across all connected clients. With a 99.99% uptime guarantee, the service remains highly available, which is essential for websites that rely on live social proof to drive conversions. Whether it's a product launch or a status page, users can trust that the displayed numbers are always current and accurate, reinforcing the credibility of the site and its content.
• •Hum's JavaScript SDK is designed for modern build pipelines. The core package weighs only 2.4KB, and each framework integration (like @humlabs/react) adds about 1KB per template. Because the SDK uses tree-shaking and named imports, only the templates and components you actually import are included in your final bundle. This ensures that your site's performance remains optimized, even when using multiple templates, making Hum suitable for performance-sensitive applications.

Use Cases

• •Portfolio websites can benefit from Hum's unique visitor counters or live right now widgets. Designer Yuki T. added a counter to their portfolio and woke up to a Show HN front-page appearance, demonstrating how visible social proof can amplify reach and recognition. The realtime counter proves that visitors are actively engaging, which encourages new viewers to explore the portfolio thoroughly.
• •Product launch pages can use Hum's live right now widget to display the exact number of people currently viewing the page. This realtime count generates urgency and social proof, as visitors see others investigating the product. The dynamic number can drive higher conversion rates by creating a bandwagon effect, especially when combined with a countdown timer or limited-time offer.
• •Documentation sites can use Hum's page view badges to display read counts for each article. Users can quickly see which guides are most popular, building trust in the content. The sparkline charts and delta indicators help documentation authors identify trending topics and update less popular sections. This turns passive documentation into an active resource that reflects community engagement.
• •Companies can replace traditional status page widgets with a single Hum live right now embed. As demonstrated by Sidhanshu Monga at Google, a Hum tag can show realtime system status with a breathing indicator, providing a more attractive and cost-effective solution. The widget updates instantly, giving customers accurate visibility into service availability without extra infrastructure.
• •Bloggers can add a page view badge to each post, showing cumulative views and recent trends. New readers see a high view count as social proof that the content is valuable, which increases trust and encourages longer reading sessions. The delta indicator also informs writers about posts that are gaining traction, helping them identify trending topics for future content.
• •Landing pages can combine Hum's unique visitor counter and live right now widgets to showcase both cumulative and realtime activity. The unique counter displays the total number of distinct visitors, proving the page's history and popularity. The live widget adds urgency by showing current visitors, together creating a compelling narrative that builds trust and encourages user action.

Who is this for?

Hum is designed for developers, UX engineers, product designers, and indie makers who build and maintain websites. It is also ideal for product teams at startups and growth companies wanting to add realtime social proof to their landing pages, product launches, and documentation. Content creators running personal blogs or portfolio sites can benefit from the easy embed to showcase their reach. Additionally, SRE and operations teams can use Hum to display live status indicators on their status pages. Hum's straightforward installation and framework support make it accessible to any web professional looking to enhance their site's engagement without heavy backend work.