Plausible vs Fathom: the difference is who you are buying for

Plausible and Fathom sell the same promise — privacy-first, cookieless web analytics you can run without a consent banner — and the honest verdict is that the feature lists are close enough that price shape decides it. One site or fifty is the question, not which dashboard is nicer.

Short answer: one or two sites, and you want goals or funnels → Plausible. A portfolio of sites under one bill → Fathom, whose $45/mo tier includes 50 sites. Numbers below are the vendors’ published figures on 2026-08-12; both change pricing, so check before you commit.

Published numbers, 2026-08-12

	Plausible	Fathom
Entry price	$9/mo (Starter, up to 10k monthly pageviews, 1 site)	$15/mo (entry plan; pageview allowance not published on the pages we checked)
Mid tier	$14/mo Growth — up to 3 sites, team collaboration	$45/mo — up to 500,000 pageviews, 50 sites included
Higher tier	$19/mo Business — up to 10 sites, funnels and user journeys	1M plan includes 75 sites; higher tiers scale up
Extra sites	New tier	Packs of 50 for $10/mo
Free trial	2 months free on annual billing	7-day free trial
Data retention	not published on the page we checked	“Forever data retention” while you remain a customer
Goals & custom events	All tiers	not published on the page we checked
Funnels	Business tier	not published on the page we checked
Cookieless / no banner	Yes — “no cookies, no persistent identifiers”	Yes — “no cookie banners required”
Open source core	Yes	Not offered
Script weight	“54 times smaller than Google Analytics” (135KB less JS)	Marketed as lightweight; no figure published on the pages we checked

Empty cells are deliberate. We did not find the figure on the vendor’s public pages on that date, and inventing it would make every other row less trustworthy.

How to pick in one minute

• You have one product and you want to know if a launch worked. Plausible at $9. The extra $6 versus Fathom’s entry buys you goals on day one.
• You have eight side projects. Fathom. Fifty sites in the $45 tier is a different unit economics from adding Plausible tiers.
• You need funnels. Plausible Business.
• You keep data for years and hate retention math. Fathom’s “forever data retention” is the plainest statement of the two.
• You are in the EU and need the vendor’s compliance story in writing. Both publish one; read both, and read your own DPO’s opinion over ours.

The row neither vendor puts in a comparison table

Both tools tell you what traffic did. Neither tells you why the traffic is there — whether your domain gained referring domains this month, whether the page is structured for an AI engine to cite it, or what your agent should fix next. That is the gap agentsgym works in, and it is a smaller analytics product than both: no goals, no funnels, no self-hosting.

If you want that side of the picture, add it next to whichever of these two you pick — its script is cookieless as well, so the banner answer does not change: analytics without a cookie banner, or the fuller trade-off in Plausible alternative.