Fathom Analytics vs Plausible

At entry, Plausible is $9/month for 10k pageviews vs Fathom at $15/month for 100k. So Fathom looks cheaper if you actually use the headroom. At 100k pageviews — apples to apples — Plausible is $19/month and Fathom is $24/month. Plausible wins by $5/month. Above 100k both scale linearly, with Plausible holding a small lead. The catch: if you need funnels, Plausible jumps to its Business tier at roughly $69/month and the math flips in Fathom's favour. So: cheapest option overall = Plausible Growth, but only if you don't need funnels. Anyone who needs funnels but won't pay Business should look at Fathom or somewhere else entirely.

Both ship official GA4 importers. Both pull pageviews, sources, top pages, devices, and geographic data for up to two years back. Neither imports custom events with parameters or conversion goals — that data is too tied to GA4's schema to translate cleanly. In practice, the migration takes 15–30 minutes and runs async, so you keep tracking with the new tool while it backfills. Plausible's importer is slightly better documented and the resulting dashboards feel more complete because Plausible's dimensional model (page, source, country, device) maps directly onto what GA4 surfaces in its standard reports. Fathom's importer covers the same ground but presents older data in Fathom's flatter format. Honest answer: both are easy enough that migration friction is not the deciding factor. Pick on features, not import quality.

Sort of. Both let you export historical stats to CSV at any time, so your aggregate numbers are portable. What's not portable is the raw event stream — neither tool exposes individual visitor events for export, because by design they don't store them in a re-identifiable way. So if you switch from Fathom to Plausible (or vice versa), you're moving summary stats, not session-level history. The new tool starts fresh from your switch date. There's no native cross-import flow on either side. Practically: keep your old account read-only for 90 days, build new dashboards in the new tool, and don't expect chart continuity across the cutover. Plausible's self-host option gives you full database access if you go that route, but that's only useful for migration into Plausible, not out of it.

Not a real one. Fathom supports custom events — you fire `fathom.trackEvent('signup')` and it counts — but there's no UI for ordering events into a funnel and computing drop-off between steps. You can approximate funnels by querying the API and computing conversion rates yourself, but that defeats the point of using a hosted analytics product. If funnels are a hard requirement, Plausible's Business plan handles them natively, or you look at Posthog or Matomo. Fathom's position is essentially: here are events, here are pageviews, you do the analysis. That's fine for sites where the conversion question is did the click happen, yes/no and not where did people drop off in a 4-step flow. Pick Fathom only if your funnel needs are minimal.

Plausible self-host runs on a $5–$20/month VPS for a single site. The Docker compose setup brings up Plausible plus Postgres plus ClickHouse. You handle backups, security patches, ClickHouse tuning when your event volume grows, and the inevitable 2am SSH session when something breaks. Time cost is the real cost: budget 2–4 hours initial setup, then 1–2 hours/month maintenance once you're past the first quarter. Compare that to Fathom Cloud at $15/month flat — no ops, no late-night logs, no upgrade migrations. For one site under 100k pageviews, self-hosted Plausible saves about $10/month and costs you 1–2 hours/month in attention. For most operators, that's a bad trade unless you have multiple sites to amortise across. Self-hosting wins when you have 5+ sites or specific data-residency requirements that paid Cloud can't meet.

For most indie SaaS founders shipping a B2B product under $1M ARR, Fathom is the better fit. Three reasons: bundled uptime monitoring saves you a separate $10/month tool, flat pricing means no surprise upgrade when you outgrow Growth, and the polished dashboard works for sharing with non-technical co-founders or investors without explanation. Pick Plausible if you have a content marketing strategy where SEO is the main acquisition channel — the Google Search Console integration is worth more to you than uptime monitoring. Also pick Plausible if you're likely to want to self-host eventually for data control reasons; Fathom's SaaS-only model is a dead-end if your privacy posture matures. For consumer-facing indie products with high traffic and conversion funnels (free trial → paid), neither is ideal — look at PostHog's free tier.