Fathom Analytics vs Mixpanel
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
| Fathom Analytics | Mixpanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Price from | Paid | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 9 | 15 |
| What it does | Simple, private analytics on one screen you can read in ten seconds. | Event analytics for questions that start with “how many users who”. |
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.
What Mixpanel is
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that measures how people actually use a product. It works from an event-based data model, recording user interactions as discrete events, which is what makes questions of this shape answerable: how many users who did one thing went on to do another. The company was founded in 2009, and the platform now covers product, web and mobile analytics. Alongside the core analysis, Mixpanel provides session replay for watching individual sessions back, experiments and feature flagging with support for multiple environments, and anomaly detection for movements in metrics that nobody thought to go looking for. Because the flags and the analytics sit in the same product, an experiment's exposure and its outcome are recorded in the same event data. Warehouse connectors keep data in sync with a data warehouse, and there is an API for everything else. Custom data retention policies can be set, which matters where there are internal or legal limits on how long behavioural data may be kept. Pricing starts at $0. The free tier allows up to 1 million events per month, which is enough to instrument a small product properly rather than just sample it, and startups can qualify for a plan that is free for the first year. At the other end, the Enterprise plan is quoted at up to 1 trillion events and comes with a dedicated account manager. The gap between those two figures is the point of the pricing: the same event model is meant to hold from a side project up to a company with heavy traffic, and Mixpanel is used by small and midsize businesses as well as enterprises. Support outside the enterprise tier runs through documentation and a community, so routine troubleshooting is self-service. Mixpanel is not open source. It integrates with other platforms, and the combination of warehouse connectors and configurable retention is how teams keep a usable copy of their event data on their own side rather than only inside the analytics tool.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.