Plausible Analytics vs. Fathom: Which One’s Right for You?

When it comes to data analytics, there are two main schools of thought: plausible analytics and fathom. Plausible analytics is all about working with what you have and making the most of it.

Fathom, on the other hand, is all about having as much data as possible in order to get the most accurate results.

So which one is better?

In this blog post, we will compare and contrast the two methods and see which one comes out on top.

Stay tuned!

Fathom, and Plausible are two online analytics tools that place a premium on privacy. They don’t have a lot of clutter and are easy to use. Neither cookies nor other technologies are used to authenticate the user by them, so no superfluous data on the user is stored.

Now that we have a clear picture of each of these things, let’s examine how they stack up against one another. As much as possible, if not all, will be covered in order to give you a clear sense of what to look for when making your final decision.

What is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is the process of analyzing data about web traffic and activity in order to understand and optimize web usage. The main goal of web analytics is to improve a website’s performance by making it more user-friendly and efficient.

There are two main types of web analytics: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data is numerical data that can be counted and measured. This data can be used to track things like website traffic, conversion rates, and average time spent on a page. Qualitative data is non-numerical data that can’t be directly measured.

This data can be used to understand things like user behavior, customer satisfaction, and overall engagement with a website.

What is Plausible Analytics?

Plausible Analytics is a web analytics tool that focuses on privacy and usability. It doesn’t use cookies or other tracking technologies; it only stores the data you explicitly give it. This makes it one of the market’s most privacy-friendly web analytics tools.

Plausible Analytics is designed to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It has a clean and minimal interface that is easy to use. The tool also provides detailed and actionable insights into your website’s traffic and performance.

What is Fathom?

Fathom is a web analytics tool that also focuses on privacy and simplicity. Like Plausible, it doesn’t use cookies or other tracking technologies. It only stores the data you explicitly give it.

Fathom has a similar interface to Plausible; it is clean and minimalistic.

However, Fathom offers more detailed insights into your website’s traffic and performance. It also allows you to segment your traffic and drill down into the data to see how different groups of users interact with your site.

What does it Mean for Analytics Tools to be Privacy-friendly?

Analytics software that protects your customers’ privacy is essential to improving your website, tracking campaign results, and gaining a deeper understanding of your buyers.

That implies that with a Fathom or Plausible Analytics tracker set and Google Analytics disabled, your page becomes an unbreakable fortification from Google and everyone else.

Do not be fooled into thinking that Google is giving you unrestricted access to their software just because they are friendly. Your role is to serve as a tool for them to collect and analyze your consumers’ data. This service is provided at no cost to you since you are the final consumer of the goods.

As a result of their extensive use of Google’s website analytics service, the company has amassed a sizable fortune.

As a company, you’re doing the right thing by using a privacy-friendly analytics tool instead of Google to gather the information you need.

Plausible Analytics vs. Fathom: Which One is Better?

1. Script Speed & Size

Each one has a simple script to be added to its website. The Plausible script is 938 bytes in size, whereas Fathom is 2 KB. POSSIBLE is 45 times smaller than Google Analytics, whereas FATHOM is 22 times smaller. As a consequence of the decreased size of these scripts, your website will load quicker than if Google analyzed it. Fathom, on the other hand, is twice as large as plausible.

2. Validity & Infrastructure

When it comes to its infrastructure, Fathom has been rather forthcoming. A significant number of its components are hosted on Amazon Web Services. They ensure that the services are operating on a computer that is suitable for the sector.

Also, lately, they stated that they would be migrating their database to AWS DyanamoDB and shifting metrics to Elastic Search. However, we’d be able to tell you what they’re using based on their infrastructure at this moment.

They’re doing a good job of managing the present volume of traffic, though. According to their status dashboard, they seem to be plagued by several problems each month. They have a 99.98 percent uptime, which is incredible.

3. UI/UX

It’s a one-page basic and minimalistic analytics page for each of them. Just scrolling up and down will show you all you need to know. However, plausible offers a few more tools, like UTM and referrer, for monitoring bespoke campaigns.

Also, lately, plausible added a filter tool that allows you to narrow down your statistics by country, referrer, and other variables.

Despite the fact that Fathom hasn’t officially released its dashboard v3, they’ve been hard at work on a slew of new features that are sure to wow. Fathom’s v3 is expected to modify this one significantly.

4. Pricing Details

It costs $14 for the first 100,000 page views of Fathom. Comparatively, plausible costs $9 for every 10,000 visits it receives.

We like that feasible makes it inexpensive for those in the developer and creative communities that don’t have a significant number of visitors but yet care about protecting their users’ privacy.

There isn’t much difference in their cost as you go up, and both offer a bespoke plan if you can’t find an acceptable one.

Plausible

Fathom

5. Advantages & Disadvantages

It’s easy to integrate Fathom into your website. It’s customizable with the ability to alter the URL of each site to a more appropriate one. Plausible offers a similar feature, but not all of its URLs are fully functional. Also, Fathom lets you monitor multiple URLs with just one account while plausible requires a separate login.

Fathom only offers one-page, single-site reports, while plausible has no such limitation. Another advantage that Plausible offers are customizing your reports, while Fathom doesn’t have that ability.

6. User Experience

Plausible is more user-friendly than Fathom. Plausible’s most important advantage is that it’s easy to set up and manage. It’s easy to add URLs, and there’s no need to edit anything else. Fathom needs more time to get the URLs added, but that’s a small inconvenience.

7. Ad-Blockers & Other Pop-Ups

As you might have guessed, Plausible will not pop up when used on websites that block ads, whereas Fathom will. Both, however, will allow you to keep a tab on the number of users who come from each referring site. However, Plausible is much more flexible and allows you to customize the script for each referring site.

8. Open Source

Up to version 1, Fathom was available for free download and modification under an open-source license. However, beyond that point, the developers decided to restrict access to the code and make it proprietary. Plausible Analytics is available as open source software, and the company only just switched to the AGPL license.

9. User Tracking

While Fathom tracks every user visit, it also tracks each click on the page (where applicable), which means it is more likely to give an accurate number of people clicking on your link.

Plausible allows you to select any kind of referral source, including an IP address. You can then use that data to figure out which users are most important to you.

10. Data Usage & Logging

In order to store data on your computer, Plausible uses a local database. On the other hand, Fathom stores the data on a remote server and then downloads it to your machine on request.

This way, the data is available instantly, but if you ever want to analyze the data, you must upload it first. Fathom requires more storage space, so data may take longer to download.

11. Data Format

If your webmaster doesn’t specify the data format you will send, you get JavaScript, but if you do, you get JSON or CSV.

12. Inactive Users

If the users are not active for 3 months, they are removed from your stats but cannot be removed from Fathom (because of this, they will show up with 0 visits). This can be useful for businesses that are not interested in the activity of their inactive customers.

13. Customization

Plausible has a lot of features, making customization easy. It allows you to add events, specify how many visits per day, etc. On the other hand, Fathom does not have many customization capabilities. This can be seen when comparing their configuration pages. Plausible’s settings page is almost five times larger than Fathom.

Is Plausible & Fathom Analytics Compatible with the New EU General Data Protection Regulation?

No worries concerning the Schrems II judgment since both are GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, and PECR compliant to the best of our knowledge. Only Fathom Analytics, on the other hand, has been able to adapt so quickly to recent legislative developments.

To us, this makes the decision quite apparent.

Conclusion

Comparing these two solutions, Plausible looks to be a choice for those seeking an affordable starting place for web analytics, while Fathom seems to be the better option for those seeking a more dependable and battle-tested solution.

Using autoscale to manage the increase in traffic, fathom is more flexible and resilient than plausible to manage the spike in visitors and hence is more reliable in the face of unpredictable fluctuations.

However, we believe the winner is a tie between the two. In order to break Google’s stranglehold on online analytics, they are both working to reinvent the field.