Amplitude vs Fathom Analytics
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
| Amplitude | Fathom Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Price from | Freemium | Paid |
| Upvotes | 14 | 9 |
| What it does | Behavioural analytics built around cohorts and retention curves. | Simple, private analytics on one screen you can read in ten seconds. |
What Amplitude is
Amplitude is a product analytics platform for tracking what people do inside a web or mobile app and turning that behaviour into cohorts, funnels and retention curves. It is sold as a set of named modules: Product Analytics, Marketing Analytics, Session Replay, Heatmaps, Guides and Surveys, Feature Experimentation, Web Experimentation and Data Governance. Pricing follows event volume rather than headcount. Every plan, the free one included, comes with unlimited seats, so adding a colleague who only reads dashboards costs nothing. Free covers 2 million events a month with no credit card, and includes 10,000 session replays and 2,000 AI feedback records. Plus also starts at $0, because the first 2 million events are free, and scales to 70 million events a month with two years of data retention and 20 behavioural cohorts. Growth and Enterprise move to custom event-based pricing quoted by sales, with 20,000 and 50,000 monthly session replays respectively. Product Analytics is the core: cohort, churn, retention, funnel, conversion and milestone analysis, plus a Conversion Drivers view that looks specifically at the users who completed every stage of a funnel. Alerts and heatmaps unlock from the Plus plan upward. Session Replay records individual sessions on the web through either the Browser SDK or a standalone SDK, and on iOS, Android and React Native. Text is masked by default and retention limits can be set to suit. It also works with the User Privacy API and the DSAR API, so deletion and subject access requests can be answered without unpicking recordings by hand. Experiment puts feature flags and testing in the same account as the analytics. Flags can be deployed client-side or server-side, with local evaluation for low latency and remote evaluation when targeting depends on user context, and the whole thing is exposed through APIs so rollouts can be driven from a CI/CD pipeline. The statistical options go past a plain T-test to sequential testing, CUPED, multi-armed bandits, mutual exclusion groups and holdouts. Access control tightens with the plan. SSO and project permissions need Growth or higher, and role-based access control is Enterprise only. Amplitude MCP pulls insights out into an external AI tool, and Active AI Visibility prompts are capped at 500 on Free, 1,000 on Plus, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Enterprise.
What Fathom Analytics is
Fathom Analytics is a website analytics service that puts a whole site on a single dashboard page. That page covers pages, referrers, sources, devices, browsers, countries, events and UTMs. The script feeding it is 2 KB, served from cdn.usefathom.com, and goes in the page head carrying a data-site attribute with the site ID plus the defer attribute. It sets no cookies and states on that basis that no cookie banner is required. Compliance is claimed against GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy law and PECR, and EU visitor data is routed through EU-located infrastructure. Traffic can be filtered before it is counted using IP blocking, country-level blocking and an allowed domains restriction. A dashboard can be shared privately, publicly, or behind a password. Fathom is a hosted service only and cannot be self-hosted. Events are recorded with a trackEvent call taking an event name and an optional value, and conversion rate can be calculated against total page views or against total people. Two constraints are worth knowing before naming anything: an event cannot be deleted or renamed once it has fired to a dashboard, and events need http or https to fire, so they will not track from a local file. Ecommerce tracking and event tracking carry no extra fee. The API sits at api.usefathom.com/v1 with sections for Account, Sites, Events, Milestones and Reports, and allows 600 requests per hour. Calls are metered against the monthly pageview allowance, so ten Create Site calls cost the same as ten pageviews. Integrations are published for WordPress, Vue, generic single page apps, SavvyCal and ConvertKit. Pricing starts at $15 per month after a seven day free trial, and the tier covering up to 500,000 pageviews per month is $45. Every plan includes at least 50 sites, and further sites are sold in packs of 50 at $10 per month or $100 per year. Paying yearly gives two months free. Historical data is kept for the full life of the account rather than expiring after a retention window, and historical Google Analytics 4 data can be imported. There is no contract, an account can be cancelled from settings at any time, and a full data export is available on cancellation. Fathom states it has never offered discounts and does not intend to.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.