Fathom Analytics vs Sentry
Pricing
Fathom Analytics: From $14/mo
Sentry: Free tier, Team from $26/mo
Description
Fathom Analytics: Privacy-focused website analytics: no cookies, no banners, one simple dashboard
Sentry: Error tracking that shows you exactly what broke, for which user, and how to reproduce it
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
- Full stack traces with user context: you see exactly what happened
- Supports every major language and framework
- Free tier covers 5,000 errors/month, which is plenty to start
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
- Can be noisy: without tuning alert thresholds, you get bombarded
- Pricing gets complex and expensive once you need performance monitoring
- Initial setup and filtering takes time to get right
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.
Sentry catches errors in production before your users email you about them. When something breaks, you get a stack trace, the user’s browser/device info, the exact request that triggered it, and breadcrumbs showing what happened before the error. It is the difference between “something is broken” and “this specific API call fails for Firefox users on line 47.”
The free tier covers 5,000 errors per month. For a solo founder, that is more than enough unless something is seriously wrong. The main annoyance is noise: out of the box, Sentry will alert you about every third-party script error and browser extension conflict. Spend 30 minutes configuring filters when you set it up, and it becomes invaluable.
Verified
