Web Analytics · Comparison
Fathom Analytics vs. Google Analytics
Fathom Analytics and Google Analytics compared across Company facts, Pricing, Analytics capabilities, Privacy & compliance, Data ownership & deployment and Platform & integrations — every fact sourced and re-verified from each vendor's public material.
Fathom Analytics
Privacy-first, cookieless web analytics with a simple dashboard and forever data retention.
Google Analytics
Free web and app analytics platform by Google with audience and conversion insights.
Company facts
Headquarters
Victoria, Canada Fully remote-first company; Victoria, BC is the legal incorporation location.
Mountain View, CA Google's main campus (Googleplex) is in Mountain View, CA. GA4 is a Google product.
Employees
5 LinkedIn shows 2–10 employees; 3 listed profiles. Midpoint of visible data ~5.
190.8k Alphabet/Google had ~190,820 full-time employees at year-end 2025 per company reporting.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
$15 Entry plan: $15/month for up to 100k pageviews.
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Offers Free Tier
7-day free trial available; no perpetual free plan.
GA4 standard is entirely free to use with no time limit. Google Analytics 360 is the paid enterprise tier.
Free Trial Length (Days)
7 days 7-day free trial on all paid plans.
0 days No free trial needed — GA4 standard is permanently free. No paid plan exists at entry level.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
100k Entry plan ($15/mo) includes up to 100k pageviews/month.
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Entry Plan Website Limit
50 sites Up to 50 sites included on all plans; additional sites purchasable.
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Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Dashboard updates in real time; also provides a current-visitors API endpoint.
Realtime report shows active users in last 5 and 30 minutes, events, sources, and pages as they happen.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via fathom.trackEvent() JS call or data attributes.
Custom events tracked via gtag('event', '<name>', {params}) or Google Tag Manager on any plan.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
Goals are built on custom events with conversion-rate reporting.
Any event can be marked as a key event (conversion); GA4 reports key-event counts and rates by source, medium, and campaign.
Funnels
Multi-step funnel analysis is not a feature; no documentation or marketing page references it.
Funnel Exploration (in Explore) supports up to 10 steps with per-step drop-off rates, open and closed funnel modes.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
Revenue values (in cents) can be attached to custom events; Shopify integration supported.
Native ecommerce reporting includes revenue by transaction, purchase journey, checkout journey, and monetization overview.
Heatmaps
Heatmaps are not part of the product.
GA4 has no built-in click/scroll heatmap feature. Heatmaps require a separate third-party tool (e.g. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity).
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
Zero cookies used by design; visitor identification via daily-salted SHA256 hashing.
GA4 uses first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_<id>) by default. Cookieless operation is not a supported mode.
Consent Banner Required
Vendor explicitly states no cookie consent banner is needed when using Fathom.
GA4 sets cookies and processes personal data; GDPR/ePrivacy require a consent banner for EU users.
GDPR Compliant
Vendor explicitly claims GDPR compliance; conducted formal GDPR review with EU consultants.
Google states it operates as a GDPR data processor for GA4, with Data Processing Terms, ISO 27001, and consent tooling.
EU Data Residency
EU Isolation strips visitor IPs inside the EU, but the anonymized analytics data is stored on Fathom's main US servers.
EU traffic is initially collected on EU servers but is then forwarded to Google Analytics processing servers globally; data is not stored exclusively in the EU.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
Fathom is a closed-source, proprietary cloud SaaS product.
GA4 is a proprietary cloud service. No source code is publicly available.
License
proprietary Current flagship product is closed-source; an archived MIT-licensed v1 exists but is not the offered product.
proprietary GA4 is a closed-source cloud product. API client libraries are Apache 2.0 but the platform is proprietary.
Self-Hostable
Cloud-only SaaS; no self-hosting option documented or advertised.
GA4 is cloud-only with no self-hosting option. All data is sent to Google's servers.
Data Retention (Months)
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14 mo Free GA4 properties can choose 2 or 14 months retention for user/event-level data; 14 months is the maximum on the free tier.
Unlimited Data Retention
Vendor advertises 'forever' data retention on all plans.
Free GA4 caps retention at 14 months for user/event-level data. No unlimited/forever retention option on any GA4 tier.
Google Analytics Import
GA4 data import supported; Universal Analytics not supported (Google deleted UA data July 2024).
GA4 cannot import historical Universal Analytics analytics data. Data Import covers external business data (cost, item, user, offline events) only — not migrating legacy GA report history.
Raw Data Export
Export is aggregated CSVs (dashboard reports); no raw visit/event-level data export available.
Raw event-level data exportable to BigQuery (free sandbox available); daily and streaming export modes. Data API also available.
Platform & integrations
Has API
Public Stats API for aggregated reporting plus account/site/event management endpoints.
GA4 Data API (v1) enables programmatic querying of analytics data with runReport, runRealtimeReport, and more.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
135.7 KB gtag.js baseline payload; varies with property configuration.
Official WordPress Plugin
Official vendor-published WordPress plugin available at wordpress.org/plugins/fathom-analytics/.
Site Kit by Google is an official Google-published WordPress plugin that includes GA4 integration.
Email Reports
Weekly or monthly scheduled email reports available.
GA4 admins can schedule up to 50 reports for email delivery (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) in PDF or CSV format.
Public Dashboard Sharing
Dashboards can be shared publicly or via password-protected link.
GA4 reports cannot be shared publicly without a Google account. Share links require recipients to have GA property access.
The verdict
Fathom Analytics Best for privacy-first, banner-free tracking
Fathom is cookieless and states no consent banner is needed, where GA4 uses cookies and requires one. Its tracking script is 2 KB versus GA4's 135.7 KB, and it keeps data forever versus GA4's 14-month cap. It also offers public dashboard sharing GA4 lacks. Costs $15/mo with no free tier.
Full profile Google Analytics Best for free, in-depth funnel and revenue analysis
GA4 is free with no time limit, while Fathom starts at $15/mo. It adds multi-step funnel analysis (up to 10 steps) that Fathom lacks, plus raw event-level export to BigQuery versus Fathom's aggregated CSVs only. The trade-off is cookies, a required consent banner, and a 135.7 KB script.
Full profileSources · 37 verified references
usefathom.com about.google linkedin.com macrotrends.net marketingplatform.google.com support.google.com + 5 more
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