Feasible vs Fathom

Fathom has been doing privacy-friendly analytics since 2018 and has the scars to prove it. Their EU isolation work is real engineering that most of this market hasn’t bothered with. Start there, because it’s the reason to buy theirs.

Now the prices.

Price

From Fathom’s pricing page, read September 3, 2026. Annual is ten times monthly.

Annual USD, list price, before tax.

Fathom has no plan below 100,000 pageviews a month. That’s the line worth noticing. A blog doing 5,000 pageviews pays the same $150 a year as a site doing twenty times its traffic. If you’re small, you’re buying a plan sized for somebody else.

At a million pageviews a month it’s $600 against $99. Six times.

The unit is the same. The price isn’t.

Fathom is direct about what counts, which we appreciate. From their pricing FAQ:

“If you decide to use our custom event tracking system on your website or use our API, those requests will be counted as if they were pageviews.”

We count the same way. A million pageviews and custom events a month, between them - including the outbound clicks, downloads and form submissions our script fires on its own. There’s no unit argument to make here, and we’re not going to invent one.

So it comes down to the tier you land on. Say you run a SaaS marketing site at 90,000 pageviews a month and you track signups, trial starts, plan changes and doc searches - 20,000 events. That’s 110,000 on both meters. On Fathom it puts you in the 200,000 tier at $250 a year. On ours it’s 110,000 against a million, and the bill is $99 either way.

Instrument harder and Fathom’s number moves up the ladder. Ours doesn’t move until you’re ten times busier than that.

Side by side

Open source

Fathom’s hosted product is closed source. That’s a business model, not a flaw - plenty of good software is closed.

But it does mean there’s no version of Fathom you can run yourself if they ever stop, get acquired, or price you out. “Fathom Lite” on GitHub is MIT-licensed and still up, and Fathom says they’ll keep fixing bugs in it, but it has had no code changes since January 2023, and it uses cookies - the hosted product doesn’t. It isn’t the product.

Feasible is AGPL-3.0-or-later, and the build we host is the build you can run. There’s no cut-down edition and no feature held back for the paid plan. One Go binary, one SQLite file, 512 MB of RAM. If we disappear, you keep running it. That’s the point of it being there - see open source web analytics for the whole argument, including what AGPL asks of you.

Where Fathom wins

EU isolation, free on every plan. European visitors’ pageviews are routed to EU servers, and Fathom says the IP address is stripped inside the EU and never reaches their US infrastructure. We don’t have this. Cloudmanic Labs is in Oregon; our transfers run on standard contractual clauses through our DPA. If your legal team wants EU processing, Fathom answers that and we don’t.

“Forever” retention. While you’re a customer, your full history stays available. Ours is five years. Theirs is better.

A longer track record. Years more production time, a large paying customer base, and a company that has publicly worked through the compliance questions in detail. If you want the boring, proven option in this category, that’s a real argument.

Their script is smaller than ours. Measured the same day with gzip -9: Fathom 2,092 bytes, Feasible 3,377. They win it.

Their over-limit policy is good. They don’t switch your analytics off over a traffic spike. Neither do we - we email you, and nothing stops mid-month. We’re not claiming an edge here; both approaches are humane.

Data health

Every analytics tool drops traffic. Bots, scrapers, datacenter addresses, browsers too old to trust, requests from a hostname you never registered. That’s correct behavior - you don’t want a crawler in your visitor count.

The question is whether you can find out.

Feasible has a health screen for every site that counts the last 24 hours of dropped events and gives each one a named reason: bot, datacenter_ip, referrer_spam, outdated_browser, automation, hostname_not_allowed, shield_ip, rate_limited, and a dozen more.

It also tells you which address it resolved for your last request and from which header, and warns you if your reverse proxy isn’t forwarding visitor addresses - the failure that quietly collapses every visitor into one and geolocates them all to your datacenter. There’s a button that fires a real test event through the public URL, so it exercises your proxy and headers the way a browser would.

Nobody else in this comparison publishes a counted, reasoned drop log. It’s the difference between “the numbers look low this week” and “347 events were rejected because staging.example.com isn’t on your hostname list, here’s the button to allow it.”

Moving over

Feasible imports CSV and ZIP uploads. There’s no Fathom-specific importer - export your data from Fathom and bring it as CSV, and pages, sources, locations, devices and browsers land on the same charts as your live traffic.

Both scripts are a single tag in your <head>, so you can run them side by side for a week and compare the numbers before you cancel anything. We’d recommend it. Two tools counting the same traffic will never agree - different bot filters, different session rules - and it’s better to see that gap on your own site than to read about it.

Which one to pick

Then the useful question is which part of Fathom you’re replacing. If it’s the EU isolation, don’t - nothing here replaces it, and we’ve said so twice already. If it’s the 100,000-pageview minimum on a site that’s nowhere near 100,000, or $600 a year at a million, that’s what the table at the top has been measuring.

Where Feasible wins

You’re small and you don’t want to pay a 100,000-pageview minimum. You’re large and $600 a year for counting pageviews looks like a lot. You run more sites than a pack of 50. You want funnels, custom properties and webhooks. You want the source.

That’s it. It’s not a long list, and it’s mostly about the bill.

More: the whole price ladder across every vendor, or what Feasible does with the gaps listed.