Fathom Analytics vs Google Analytics
Pricing
Fathom Analytics: From $14/mo
Google Analytics: Free
Description
Fathom Analytics: Privacy-focused website analytics: no cookies, no banners, one simple dashboard
Google Analytics: Google's free web and app analytics for traffic sources, user journeys and conversions, linked to Google Ads and Search Console
Pros
- No cookies means no cookie consent banner, one less annoyance for visitors
- Single dashboard shows everything you need in one screen
- Script loads in under 1KB, so it does not slow your site down
- Free of charge, with one property able to cover both your website and your app
- Integrates with Google Ads and Google Search Console
- Machine-learning features estimate which customers are likely to take an action next
Cons
- No free tier: $14/month minimum is a real cost for pre-revenue founders
- Far fewer features than Google Analytics 4 (no funnels, no cohorts, no custom reports)
- No event tracking on the lowest plan
- Ties data to cookies and user identifiers, unlike cookie-free tools such as Plausible and Fathom
- The free version keeps user-level and event-level data for explorations for 14 months at most
- Longer retention (26 to 50 months) needs Analytics 360, the paid enterprise version
Details
Fathom gives you the analytics you actually look at (visitors, page views, top pages, referrers) and nothing else. No cookie consent banners (because there are no cookies), no complex custom reports, no spending an hour configuring dashboards. Open it, see your numbers, close it.
Founded by Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis (of Company of One fame). At $14/month with no free tier, you are paying for simplicity and privacy. If you need funnels, cohort analysis, or event tracking, PostHog or even GA4 gives you more. If you just want to know “how many people visited and where did they come from,” Fathom respects both your time and your visitors’ privacy.
Google Analytics is Google’s own analytics service for websites and apps. You add a tag to your site or app and get reports on where visitors come from, what they do and which of them convert. It costs nothing.
It suits founders who run Google Ads or want the most detail without paying. The reports cover cross-platform journeys, attribution across channels and machine-learning forecasts.
Two limits are worth knowing. Data in explorations and funnel reports is kept for 2 or 14 months on the free version (standard reports are not affected), and the data is linked to cookies and identifiers. If you would rather not use cookies at all, look at Plausible or Fathom.
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