Fathom Analytics vs Plausible
Both are analytics tools. Here is what separates them.
| Fathom Analytics | Plausible | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Price from | Paid | Paid |
| Upvotes | 9 | 12 |
| What it does | Simple, private analytics on one screen you can read in ten seconds. | Web analytics with no cookies, no banner and a script under 1KB. |
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 Plausible is
Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool that reports how many people visit a site and what they do there, without cookies and without collecting personal data. It is built as a direct alternative to Google Analytics for site owners who want the numbers but not the tracking. The tracking script is under 1 KB, small enough that it does not meaningfully affect how fast a page loads. Because it sets no cookies and stores no personal data, a site running it does not need a cookie banner for analytics, and the product is compliant with GDPR and CCPA. It does not follow visitors across sites or devices, and the rest of the design follows from that: there is no individual-level profile to query, so every report is an aggregate. The dashboard updates in real time and fits on a single screen. It answers the questions most site owners actually have, which pages get read, where visitors came from, which campaigns worked, and what people did before they left. Goals can be configured with custom properties to track signups, purchases, clicks and form completions, and revenue can be attributed to them. Scroll depth, file downloads and outbound clicks are tracked automatically rather than needing separate setup, and bot traffic is filtered out by default. Teams can manage several sites under one account, sort them by traffic, and control who sees which of them. Two-factor authentication is available. There is an API for reading statistics and for sending events from a server, plus integrations with Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager and WordPress. Existing Google Analytics data can be imported, so moving does not mean losing the history. Plausible is open source under the AGPLv3 licence and the code is public and auditable on GitHub. It can be self-hosted, so a team that wants its analytics on its own infrastructure can run the whole thing itself. The hosted service is based and hosted in the EU. Uku Taht started the project in December 2018 and paid subscriptions launched the following year. The company is self-funded and profitable, has no outside investors, crossed one million dollars in annual recurring revenue in 2022, and is now a team of ten serving more than twenty thousand paying subscribers. Pricing starts at four dollars a month on an annual plan and runs to ninety dollars a month, with a free trial.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.