Plausible Analytics vs. Fathom Analytics

Last verified 2 days ago · 36 sources · Updated automatically

Plausible Analytics and Fathom 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.

Plausible Analytics

Open-source, privacy-first web analytics — a lightweight, cookieless Google Analytics alternative.

Founded2018

HQ EU (remote-first)

Visit Plausible Analytics Full profile

Fathom Analytics

Privacy-first, cookieless web analytics with a simple dashboard and forever data retention.

Founded2018

HQ Victoria, Canada

Visit Fathom Analytics Full profile

Attribute

Plausible Analytics

Fathom Analytics

Company facts

Headquarters

EU (remote-first)

Victoria, Canada Fully remote-first company; Victoria, BC is the legal incorporation location.

Employees

5 LinkedIn shows 2–10 employees; 3 listed profiles. Midpoint of visible data ~5.

Pricing

Starting Monthly Price (USD)

$9 Starter plan at $9/mo (monthly billing); 10k pageviews, 1 site

$15 Entry plan: $15/month for up to 100k pageviews.

Offers Free Tier

Plausible Community Edition (CE) is a free self-hostable open-source version

7-day free trial available; no perpetual free plan.

Free Trial Length (Days)

30 days 30-day free trial on all paid plans, no credit card required

7 days 7-day free trial on all paid plans.

Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)

10k Starter plan includes up to 10k monthly pageviews

100k Entry plan ($15/mo) includes up to 100k pageviews/month.

Entry Plan Website Limit

1 sites Starter plan covers 1 site; Growth allows up to 3, Business up to 10

50 sites Up to 50 sites included on all plans; additional sites purchasable.

Analytics capabilities

Real-Time Dashboard

Real-time dashboard updates every 30 seconds

Dashboard updates in real time; also provides a current-visitors API endpoint.

Custom Event Tracking

Custom event tracking available via JS snippet, CSS class, or Events API

Custom events tracked via fathom.trackEvent() JS call or data attributes.

Goal / Conversion Tracking

Supports pageview goals and custom event goals with conversion rate reporting

Goals are built on custom events with conversion-rate reporting.

Funnels

Funnel analysis is a Business plan feature ($19/mo+)

Multi-step funnel analysis is not a feature; no documentation or marketing page references it.

Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking

Revenue tracking (monetary values on events) is a Business plan feature ($19/mo+)

Revenue values (in cents) can be attached to custom events; Shopify integration supported.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are not part of the product.

Privacy & compliance

Cookieless Tracking

No cookies or persistent identifiers used by default; daily-rotating anonymous hash only

Zero cookies used by design; visitor identification via daily-salted SHA256 hashing.

Consent Banner Required

No cookie banner needed — Plausible collects no personal data and sets no cookies

Vendor explicitly states no cookie consent banner is needed when using Fathom.

GDPR Compliant

Yes

Vendor explicitly claims GDPR compliance; conducted formal GDPR review with EU consultants.

EU Data Residency

Data stored in Falkenstein, Germany on Hetzner servers; CDN via Bunny (Slovenia)

EU Isolation strips visitor IPs inside the EU, but the anonymized analytics data is stored on Fathom's main US servers.

Data ownership & deployment

Open Source

Community Edition (CE) is AGPLv3; cloud product is built on same open-source codebase

Fathom is a closed-source, proprietary cloud SaaS product.

License

AGPLv3

proprietary Current flagship product is closed-source; an archived MIT-licensed v1 exists but is not the offered product.

Self-Hostable

Plausible Community Edition (CE) is officially supported for self-hosting

Cloud-only SaaS; no self-hosting option documented or advertised.

Data Retention (Months)

36 mo Starter and Growth plans retain 3 years (36 months) of data; Business/Enterprise retain 5+ years

—

Unlimited Data Retention

Starter/Growth: 3-year retention; Business: 5-year retention

Vendor advertises 'forever' data retention on all plans.

Google Analytics Import

Official GA4 import supported (up to 5 GA4 properties); Universal Analytics (UA) not supported

GA4 data import supported; Universal Analytics not supported (Google deleted UA data July 2024).

Raw Data Export

CSV/ZIP exports available on all plans; Stats API on Business plan; raw event-level export requires Enterprise

Export is aggregated CSVs (dashboard reports); no raw visit/event-level data export available.

Platform & integrations

Has API

Stats API is a Business plan feature; Events API (for sending data) available on all plans

Public Stats API for aggregated reporting plus account/site/event management endpoints.

Tracking Script Size (KB)

1.2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.

2 KB Measured compressed transfer size.

Official WordPress Plugin

Official WordPress plugin maintained by Plausible

Official vendor-published WordPress plugin available at wordpress.org/plugins/fathom-analytics/.

Email Reports

Weekly (every Monday) and/or monthly (1st of month) email reports; analytics embedded in email

Weekly or monthly scheduled email reports available.

Public Dashboard Sharing

Shared links (optionally password-protected) and fully public dashboards supported

Dashboards can be shared publicly or via password-protected link.

The verdict

Plausible Analytics

Best for open-source control and EU data residency

Plausible is open source under AGPLv3 and the only one here you can self-host, so you can run it on your own infrastructure or audit the code. Cloud data is stored in Germany, giving you EU residency that Fathom lacks. A $9 starter plan, a free trial, funnel analysis, and raw data export round it out for buyers who want ownership and transparency.

Full profile

Fathom Analytics

Best for high traffic and many sites at a flat entry price

Fathom's $15 entry plan covers 100k pageviews and up to 50 sites, versus Plausible's 10k pageviews and 1 site at $9 - far more headroom for high-traffic or multi-site portfolios. It also keeps data forever. The tradeoffs: it's closed-source, cloud-only, stores data on US servers, and has no funnels or raw-data export.

Full profile

Sources · 36 verified references

plausible.io usefathom.com linkedin.com github.com cdn.usefathom.com

Affiliate disclosure. DecisionWire may earn a commission when you sign up through links on this page. Commissions never influence our data, scores, or rankings.