Fathom Analytics vs Umami

Not natively. Umami does not ship an uptime monitor in either the self-hosted build or Umami Cloud, and there is no roadmap item suggesting one is coming. The standard workaround is to pair Umami with a dedicated free tool like UptimeRobot, Better Uptime's free tier, or Healthchecks.io. Each of those will email or Slack you when a site is down, which is functionally what Fathom's monitor does. The trade-off is one more account, one more dashboard, and one more thing to configure. If consolidation matters and you'd rather one bill, Fathom's bundled monitor is the cleaner answer.

Umami runs comfortably on the smallest practical VPS. A $5/month Hetzner CX11 or DigitalOcean basic droplet with 1 vCPU and 1GB of RAM is enough for a low-to-moderate-traffic site, with the Umami app itself using around 200 to 400MB and PostgreSQL or MySQL taking a similar chunk. Disk needs are modest unless you're tracking millions of events per month: 10GB is plenty for the first year on a typical site. The realistic upgrade trigger is event volume, not pageviews: once you're consistently above one to two million events per month, bump to 2GB of RAM and consider tuning your database to keep query times reasonable on long date ranges.

Umami has funnels, Fathom does not. On Umami this works on the self-hosted build for free or on Umami Cloud Plus, the higher tier above Cloud Pro. The funnel report lets you define a sequence of events or pages and see drop-off between each step, which is the standard pattern for analysing checkout, signup, or any multi-step conversion flow. Fathom has explicitly chosen not to ship funnels, partly because the team prefers a small, opinionated feature set and partly because real funnel analysis tends to require richer event data than Fathom is built to capture. If multi-step conversion analysis is central to your work, Fathom is not the right tool.

Partially. Both tools let you export raw event data as CSV, so you can take historical events out of either one. The difficulty is that the schemas don't line up perfectly: Fathom's event model is simpler and slightly different from Umami's, so direct one-to-one import is not supported by either project officially. The pragmatic approach is to keep your historical data in the old tool as an archive, switch the script tag on your sites to the new tool from a clean cutover date, and accept a short period where the old dashboard owns the past and the new one owns the future. Most teams do this once per platform migration and never look back.

Yes. Fathom has a real-time visitor count that updates every few seconds and shows current sessions, the pages they're on, and the referrers. Umami shows the same in its dashboard with similar refresh latency. Neither requires any special configuration; it's on by default once tracking is installed. The implementations differ slightly under the hood, but the user-facing experience is essentially identical: a number at the top of the dashboard that ticks up and down as people land on and leave your site. If real-time is a hard requirement, both products satisfy it equally.

Fathom offers a 30-day free trial of any plan, no credit card required, with the full feature set unlocked including the uptime monitor and the comparison views. After 30 days you either pay $15/month minimum or your tracking stops collecting new data. Umami offers two free paths: a 14-day Cloud trial on the Pro plan, and self-hosting which is genuinely free forever under the MIT licence. There is no free tier on Umami Cloud after the trial; you pay $9/month or you switch to self-host. If you want to evaluate both before committing, install both side by side for a fortnight on a test site and decide on operational feel, not just dashboard screenshots.