Fathom vs Plausible: Which privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative should you use?
A 2020 comparison of Fathom and Plausible across privacy, dashboards, pricing, and the trade-offs of leaving Google Analytics.
Today 84% websites use Google Analytics on their website to track user activities. The reason for its popularity is that it’s free(not literally), I mean who doesn’t love free stuff. But there is always a cost and that cost in the case of Google Analytics is data, they simply take this data from these websites and use it for their ads.
Referral disclosure: This archived comparison includes a referral link to Fathom. If you sign up through it, I may receive a benefit. Verify current features, pricing, and terms with each provider.
Fathom and Plausible were privacy-focused web analytics options when this article was written. Their products, legal terms, and data practices can change, so treat the comparison below as historical context and check their current documentation before choosing a service.
UI/UX
Both of them offer a single page simple and minimalistic analytics page. You can see all the basic things by just scrolling up and down. But plausible has few extra features like UTM and referrer for tracking custom campaigns. Also recently plausible launched the filter option where you can filter the analytics-based upon the country, referrer, etc. Fathom is working on v3 of their dashboard which will add more features, they haven’t officially launched it yet but they have been working on pretty cool stuff. This one was very close probably will change once fathom launches their v3.
Winner: Plausible
Script size and speed.
Both offered lightweight scripts when I tested them in 2020. The sizes and performance figures below were measured then and are not current benchmarks. Script size alone is not a guarantee of faster loading; measure the version and deployment setup you use.
P.S: I came to know that plausible doesn’t have a globally available CDN network and their script takes almost 203ms whereas fathom takes only 7ms.
Winner: Fathom
Pricing
The prices in this section were listed in 2020 and are stale. Plans, limits, currencies, and self-hosting options change; compare the current pricing pages directly rather than relying on these numbers.
Winner: Plausible
Reliability and Infrastructure
The infrastructure and availability observations in this section were based on public information and dashboards I saw in 2020. They are not a current reliability assessment, and the linked status information may no longer represent the same service or period.
Winner: Fathom
GDPR, CCPA, and PECR Compliant
Both of them are GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant because they don’t collect and store user data.
Winner: tie
Ad-Blockers
Both of them kind of failed to avoid uBlock origin. But once I moved to the custom domain they both started to work. So no worries over there.
Winner: tie
The table below is a snapshot of my 2020 tests and the providers’ public materials at that time. Its sizes, prices, infrastructure descriptions, compliance statements, and feature labels should not be read as current claims.
| Category | Fathom | Plausible |
|---|---|---|
| UI/UX | Simple, minimalistic, and intuitive, but lacking features such as filtering and UTM tracking. | Almost identical to Fathom, with UTM tracking and filters for country and other dimensions. |
| Script size | 2.0KB | 938B |
| Pricing | Starts at $14 for 100k page views, with additional plans. | Starts at $4 for 10k page views, making it accessible to hobbyists. |
| Reliability and infrastructure | Hosted on AWS, with a globally available CDN for its scripts. | Reported 99.98% uptime, with servers located in the EU. |
| GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant | Yes | Yes |
| Ad blockers | Works with a custom domain; the Fathom domain was blocked in testing. | Works with a custom domain; the Plausible domain was blocked in testing. |
| Email reports | Weekly | Weekly and monthly |
| Goal tracking | Yes | Yes |
| Dashboard sharing | Public dashboards and private URLs. | Public dashboards and private URLs. |
| Open source | Open source through v1, then closed source. | Open source under the AGPL. |
Conclusion
If we see the above comparison then Plausible seems to be a winner for people who want cheap entry point and privacy-focused web analytics whereas if you want more reliable and battle-tested you should go with fathom. It’s not because plausible is not battle-tested and doesn’t offer reliability but fathom has better elasticity and resilience to handle the surge in traffic as they use autoscale to handle the surge in load. But in my opinion, they both are the winner. They both are trying to revolutionize the web-analytics industry which was a monopoly for Google. I am pretty much excited about what these two will do in the future.
P.S: The blog includes my referral link for fathom🙈.