Fathom Analytics Review (2025)

Fathom Analytics is a privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics that avoids cookies and intrusive tracking. It delivers clean, essential insights in a simple dashboard, suitable for businesses prioritizing compliance and speed.

Strengths of Fathom Analytics

Fathom Analytics excels at providing simple, basic analytics. It's great at providing an overview of what content and sources are driving the most traffic.

It has basic event and conversion tracking, as well as UTM tags.

Fathom is also faster than most of the other analytics services we've tested. This makes a joy to use; clicking through filters and segments doesn't feel like a chore at all, even with a site that has a lot of data.

Fathom is highly-opinionated; the product's central focus is privacy and GDPR compliance.

Weaknesses

Fathom Analytics strength is also its weakness. If you want a more comprehensive understanding of what users are doing on your website (for example, understanding the flow of users through your site), you're out of luck. Fathom is limited to top pages & top sources. For anything else, you'll need a more comprehensive solution, like Userbird, Google Analytics, or Amplitude.

Fathom Analytics Alternatives

Fathom Analytics is one of three mainstream lightweight analytics solutions - Fathom, Plausible & Simple Analytics. These are all comparable, offer similar feature sets and experiences, and are targeted at the same market.

Fathom Analytics and Open Source

Fathom Analytics started out as open source project, quickly gaining traction on Hackernews and X. Ultimately, its open source endeavour was shut down, on the basis that hosting analytics tends to require sophisticated setups. Like Plausible and PostHog, which also offer open source versions, they are really open source only in name- it is difficult to use them as such.