No. 5 of 30 ยท Privacy-first and cookieless
Fathom Analytics
Fifty sites on one bill and a dashboard you can read in four seconds.
Every plan includes fifty websites, where most rivals start at one and charge per site above three.
The verdict
Fathom is the right answer to one specific question: what do I install when I look after a lot of small sites? Every plan, including the $15 entry plan, carries fifty websites, and extra sites come in packs of fifty for $10 a month. For a freelancer with thirty client sites or an agency running a portfolio, that single line turns a per-site pricing problem into a rounding error, and nothing else on this list does it as cheaply.
The product itself is the most deliberately minimal on this list. One page, one chart, the numbers underneath, and almost no configuration. That is a genuine design achievement and it is why non-technical clients get on with it: there is nothing to get wrong. It has been trading since 2018, it is Canadian rather than American by design, and it offers EU isolation for customers who need processing to stay in Europe.
What you actually get
What you give up for that simplicity is depth, and the gap is wider than the marketing suggests. There are no funnels. Segmentation is shallow next to Plausible's saved segments or Matomo's. There are no heatmaps and no session replay at all. Custom events exist but they count against the same pageview allowance, so an event-heavy site climbs the price ladder faster than its traffic implies.
The thing that costs it most on this list is not a feature, though, it is the published limit policy. Go over your allowance and Fathom emails you at 30 per cent over and locks the account on day seven. Locking a paying customer's dashboard within a week of a good launch is a defensible commercial choice and it is clearly disclosed, which is why this is a 5 and not a 2. But it is the opposite of how Absolutely Analytics handles the same event, and a traffic spike is exactly the moment you most want to look at your analytics. Price it in before you buy, particularly if you write things that occasionally do well on Hacker News.
Best for
Freelancers, agencies and anyone maintaining a portfolio of small sites, where fifty sites on a $15 plan makes the per-site economics of every rival look silly.
Getting it running
One script tag, under two kilobytes. There is a WordPress plugin and a documented custom-domain option to serve the script first-party, which meaningfully reduces ad-blocker loss.
What to watch out for
The seven-day lock at 30 per cent over allowance is the single hardest overage policy on this list and it is worth reading before you commit. No funnels, no heatmaps, no session replay. The trial is seven days where most rivals give thirty. Custom events share the pageview meter.
Pricing and practicalities
$15 for 100,000 monthly pageviews, $25 for 200,000, $45 for 500,000, rising from there. Fifty sites on every plan. Unlimited CSV export and email reports. Full history while you are subscribed. Annual billing takes two months off. Prices read 2026-09-11.
Who should go elsewhere
Anyone running one site who wants depth rather than breadth: at 100,000 pageviews Plausible Analytics costs less and does considerably more. It is also wrong for anyone whose traffic is spiky, where the overage conduct of Absolutely Analytics is worth the difference on its own.
How it compares
The honest head-to-head is against Plausible Analytics, which wins on depth and loses on sites-per-plan, and the answer depends entirely on how many domains you look after. Against Pirsch Analytics the comparison is closer than it looks, since Pirsch also gives fifty sites and costs less.
Head to head:
The ten measures
Each measure is scored 0 to 10 and weighted. The overall figure is the weighted mean, and it is relative to the other 29 tools on this list rather than absolute. How this works.
What this rests on
Fathom's own pricing page and FAQ, read 2026-09-11, including its published answers on pageview limits, site counts and event billing; its documentation on EU isolation and custom domains.
Desk research against the vendor's published pricing and FAQ. The overage claim is taken from Fathom's own published policy and from the competitor table Absolutely Analytics publishes, which agreed on the same date.
This is a desk review. I have not been given access by the vendor, I have no commercial relationship with them, and everything above is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. If something here is wrong, tell me and I will correct it.