If you’ve decided Google Analytics is overkill—or you just want to stop dealing with cookie banners—you’ve probably narrowed your shortlist to Plausible and Fathom. Both are privacy-first, cookieless, and built for operators who want clean dashboards instead of data warehouses.
But they’re not interchangeable. One prioritises speed and price. The other prioritises polish and brand positioning. Here’s what matters when you’re deciding where to send your $14–$24 per month.
Pricing: same until you scale
Both charge based on monthly pageviews, and both start at $14/month for up to 10,000 pageviews.
Plausible: $14/mo for 10k pageviews, $24/mo for 100k, $69/mo for 1M. Annual billing gets you two months free.
Fathom: $15/mo for 100k pageviews (yes, 10× more volume at nearly the same price), $25/mo for 250k, $55/mo for 1M. Discounts for annual.
At low volume, they’re equivalent. Once you cross 50,000 pageviews per month, Fathom becomes meaningfully cheaper. If you’re running a single content site doing 200k pageviews a month, Fathom saves you $100+ per year.
But if you track multiple properties—say, a main blog, a documentation site, and a landing page—Plausible’s $14/mo entry tier can feel punitive. You’ll pay per site unless you consolidate under roll-up reporting (more on that below).
Interface and speed
Plausible’s dashboard loads faster. That’s not subjective—it’s lighter on JavaScript and renders in under a second on most connections. The layout is spartan: one page, collapsible cards for top sources, pages, countries, devices. No tabs, no sub-navigation.
Fathom’s interface is more polished. It has tabs for current visitors, uptime monitoring (included free), and event funnels. The design feels more considered, but it’s also heavier. On slower connections or mobile, you’ll notice the lag.
If you check analytics daily and want instant feedback, Plausible wins. If you check weekly and want a bit more UI personality, Fathom feels nicer to open.
Features: where they diverge
Both handle the basics—pageviews, referrers, devices, goals, custom events. But the extras differ.
Plausible includes email reports (daily, weekly, monthly), shared dashboards, and Google Search Console integration. It also offers a self-hosted option if you want to run your own instance (starts at $0 for self-hosters, but you handle the server).
Fathom includes uptime monitoring (checks your site every 30 seconds from multiple regions), EU isolation (useful for GDPR-strict clients), and better event funnel visualisation. It also lets you import historical Google Analytics data, which Plausible doesn’t.
Neither tool offers heatmaps, session replay, or A/B testing. If you want those, you’re looking at Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity (free, privacy-questionable) as a separate layer.
Roll-up reporting and multi-site operators
Both let you combine multiple properties into one dashboard, but the UX differs.
Plausible calls this “roll-up reporting.” You pay for total pageviews across all sites, but you can view aggregate stats or drill into individual properties. It’s clean, but the setup requires manually grouping domains.
Fathom doesn’t have native roll-up views. You track each site separately and flip between them in a dropdown. If you want combined stats, you export CSVs and merge them yourself. For operators running 5+ properties, this gets tedious fast.
When to pick Plausible
- You’re starting out and want the lowest entry price for a single site.
- You value dashboard speed and minimal UI chrome.
- You want Google Search Console integration baked in.
- You’re open to self-hosting (or already run your own infrastructure).
When to pick Fathom
- You’re doing 100k+ pageviews per month and want better per-pageview pricing.
- You need uptime monitoring without adding another tool.
- You want to import your GA history before making the switch.
- You prefer a more polished interface and don’t mind the weight.
What neither tool solves
Both are great if you want top-line traffic numbers and respect visitor privacy. But if you need user-level attribution—knowing which blog post led to a purchase three weeks later—you’ll need something heavier. Fathom and Plausible don’t track users across sessions. That’s the tradeoff for being cookieless.
If you monetise via ads, neither integrates with ad networks. You’ll still need Google Analytics or a dedicated ad analytics layer. If you monetise via products or subscriptions, you can wire custom events to both tools and get conversion counts—but you won’t get cohort analysis or LTV breakdowns.
For most solo operators and small content teams, that’s fine. You’re not optimising funnels at scale. You just want to know what’s working.
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