Plausible vs Fathom Analytics

What the numbers say

Both ladders are counted in pageviews, and both vendors put more than pageviews on them. Plausible adds pageviews and custom events together across every site in a team, and outbound clicks, file downloads, form submissions and 404 pages become custom events the moment you switch those measurements on. Fathom counts events toward the same allowance, and its API documentation goes further: every API request counts too, so ten calls that create sites weigh as much as ten pageviews.

What a plan carries matters more than the rung you land on. Every Fathom plan includes at least 50 sites, the API and the full history while the subscription runs, and the allowance is the total across them. Plausible sells the same traffic three times over: the entry plan covers one site; team members, shared links and embedded dashboards arrive with Growth; custom properties, the Stats API, funnels, user journeys and ecommerce revenue attribution with Business. Retention follows the same logic: a fixed three years on the entry plan and five on Business, against a history that lasts as long as you pay.

Storage is where the rows sit furthest apart. Fathom routes visitors from the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland and the UK through servers in Falkenstein, Helsinki or Nuremberg, anonymizes the pageview there and stores the record on US infrastructure; a separate script address sends all global traffic through the EU. Plausible processes visitor data on EU infrastructure and keeps site data on a server in Germany.

Who picks which

The fork is what you can run yourself. Plausible Community Edition is the same code under the AGPL license, published twice a year, without marketing funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API, and with basic bot filtering in place of the data-centre ranges the cloud excludes. The vendor is direct about the trade: server capacity, backups, uptime and applying security releases become your work. Moving between them runs in either direction, through the CSV export and import in site settings.

Fathom is a hosted service, and its arithmetic suits anyone carrying many sites at once: the sites come with the plan rather than with a tier above it. Its open-source Fathom Lite is a previous version of the software, and the repository sets out the difference: Lite is self-hosted, uses cookies, runs the older dashboard and has no API, custom events, ecommerce, campaigns, Google Analytics import or email reports, and the vendor maintains it for bug fixes rather than new features.

Questions and answers

Can I move my stats from one to the other?

Not through an importer. Fathom’s importer reads Google Analytics 4 properties, and its page adds that Universal Analytics data was deleted by Google on 1 July 2024. Plausible’s CSV import accepts outside files only in its own shape, ten named tables with fixed file names, while a Fathom export arrives as a set of dashboard CSVs, one per report. Plan an overlap with both scripts on the page instead.

Can I run either of them on my own server?

One of them, with the gaps listed above. Fathom Lite is a previous generation of the software rather than a self-hosted copy of the current product. If your own server decides the question, the open source and self-hosted list is a better place to start.

What happens when I stop paying?

Both describe a locked dashboard rather than an instant wipe, on different clocks. Plausible counts to the end of the billing period, then locks the dashboard while the export in site settings stays reachable, stops collecting a month later, and emails before deleting sites and stats. Fathom keeps access to the end of the period, then queues deletion of sites and data, which can take up to 60 days. Either will restore the history if you resubscribe before the deletion date.