Fathom is a genuinely good product. But if you want a lower flat price or a permanent free tier, here's an honest, side-by-side look at the cookieless options — including one we build and run ourselves.
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| Tool | Pricing model | Free tier | Cookieless | Web Vitals | Self-host |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fathom | Volume-tiered (rises with pageviews) | 30-day trial | Yes | Check site | No (hosted) |
| GhostMetrics | Flat $9.99/mo · unlimited | Free forever (1 site) | Yes | Yes (FCP/LCP/CLS/TTFB) | No (hosted) |
| Plausible | Volume-tiered · open-source | Trial (cloud) | Yes | Check site | Yes |
| Simple Analytics | Volume-tiered | Trial | Yes | Check site | No (hosted) |
| Umami | Open-source · cloud option | Yes (self-host) | Yes | Check site | Yes |
We list only pricing we can verify. For every tool except GhostMetrics we point you to the vendor's own pricing page rather than quote numbers that may have changed — plans move around, and we won't invent tiers.
People rarely leave Fathom because it's bad. They leave because one specific thing stops fitting. The most common trigger is the shape of the bill. Fathom prices on volume — as your monthly pageviews climb, you move up tiers, and a site that takes off can push you into a plan that feels steep for what is, ultimately, a simple line chart and a top-pages list. If your traffic is spiky (a launch, a viral post, a seasonal spike), volume-tiered pricing can feel like being punished for success.
The second trigger is the absence of a permanent free tier. Fathom offers a 30-day free trial, which is plenty of time to evaluate, but there's no $0 forever plan for that one small side project, client microsite, or landing page you just want basic numbers on. Agencies and indie builders who run a dozen tiny sites feel this most: they don't want to pay a per-site or volume premium to know whether a brochure page got 40 visits or 400.
A third, quieter reason is consolidation of many small sites. If you manage several properties, you start asking whether one flat monthly price for "everything" would be simpler than watching a meter. That's a legitimate procurement question, not a knock on Fathom.
What almost nobody is escaping is the privacy model. Fathom is cookieless and consent-banner-free, and that's precisely the part people want to keep. So the goal of a good switch isn't "get away from Fathom's approach" — it's "keep the privacy-first, no-banner approach, but change the pricing math or add a free tier." That framing matters, because it rules out heavy, cookie-based platforms entirely. If you were considering moving to a cookie-dependent tool to save money, you'd be trading away the exact thing that made Fathom attractive: no consent banner, no personal-data liability, and numbers your legal team doesn't flinch at. Keep the model, change the meter.
Let's be fair to the incumbent, because a comparison that trashes the thing you already like isn't useful. Fathom Analytics earned its reputation, and several of its decisions are worth defending.
It's genuinely cookieless. No cookie banner, no consent gymnastics for basic traffic stats in most jurisdictions. That single choice removes a whole category of legal and UX friction. For a lot of teams, that's the entire reason they picked it.
Every feature is on every paid plan. Fathom doesn't gate funnels or important reports behind an enterprise upsell — buy any plan and you get the product. That's a refreshing contrast to legacy analytics where the useful stuff hides behind "contact sales." It makes budgeting predictable and stops the feeling that you're always one tier away from the report you actually need.
The dashboard is calm. Fathom's whole design philosophy is a single readable screen: visitors, pageviews, top content, top referrers, and where people are, without the sprawling menu tree of enterprise suites. You can hand it to a non-technical stakeholder and they understand it in ten seconds. That restraint is a feature, not a limitation.
It's mature and stable. Fathom has been around long enough to be boring in the best way — it loads, the numbers are there, the script is light, and it isn't chasing a new dashboard redesign every quarter. For a tool you check daily, stability is underrated.
It respects the visitor. No personal-data hoarding, no selling behavioral profiles, a lightweight script that doesn't drag your page speed down. If your brand cares about how you treat the people who visit your site, Fathom's posture is aligned with that.
All of which is to say: if Fathom's pricing works for your traffic and you don't need a free tier, the honest recommendation is to stay put. The rest of this page is for the people whose one specific thing stopped fitting.
This is the comparison most people actually came for, so let's be precise and only use numbers we can stand behind. The two products share a philosophy — hosted, cookieless, no consent banner — and differ mainly in how they charge and whether there's a free tier.
Fathom's model is volume-tiered. You pick a plan based on monthly pageviews, and the price rises as your traffic grows. Every feature is included at every tier, and there's a 30-day free trial rather than a permanent free plan. That's a clean, predictable model as long as your traffic is predictable — but it means your analytics bill is coupled to your success. For exact current tiers and thresholds, check Fathom's own pricing page; we won't quote figures that may have shifted since you're reading this.
GhostMetrics' model is flat, with a real free tier. There are exactly two options:
The practical difference is the direction the two bills move. On a volume-tiered plan, a traffic spike can push you up a tier. On GhostMetrics Pro, ten sites or one site, ten thousand pageviews or ten million, the number on the invoice is $9.99. If you run several properties or you expect growth, a flat price removes the "what will this cost me next month?" anxiety entirely.
The honest counterpoint: flat pricing is a bet the vendor makes, and you should size it against your reality. If you run a single modest site that will never leave Fathom's lowest tier, the savings may be small and switching costs (re-tagging, re-learning) may not be worth it. The flat model shines for multi-site owners, agencies, and anyone whose traffic is lumpy. Match the meter to your situation, not to a headline.
Pricing gets you in the door; features decide whether you stay. Here's what GhostMetrics actually ships, described without exaggeration, so you can map it against Fathom's feature list on their site.
Dashboards. GhostMetrics has 11 analytics tabs: Overview, Pages, Visitors, Geo, Sources, Performance, Engagement, a "Who's-Looking" organization-detection view, Events, Live, and Funnel. The Live tab shows current visitors in real time; Overview is the single-screen summary you'd hand a stakeholder. If you like Fathom's one-glance readability, the Overview tab will feel familiar; the extra tabs are there when you want to go deeper rather than being forced on you up front.
Events and attribution. Custom events are supported with UTM attribution, so you can tie a signup or download back to the campaign that drove it. Referrer and UTM breakdowns are first-class, not an afterthought.
Funnels and paths. The Funnel tab builds conversion funnels and shows entry and exit paths — where people arrive, where they drop, and where they leave. That's the kind of report that usually costs extra elsewhere.
Core Web Vitals. This is a genuine differentiator worth calling out. GhostMetrics reports Core Web Vitals — FCP, LCP, CLS, and TTFB — broken down by page and by device, alongside scroll depth and time-on-page. Most privacy analytics tools focus on traffic and stop there; getting performance data in the same dashboard means you can see that your slowest LCP pages are also your highest-bounce pages without bolting on a second tool. Coverage of performance metrics varies across the market, so if Vitals matter to you, check each competitor's feature list rather than assuming parity. For the broader landscape, we keep a running breakdown of cookieless analytics compared.
The script itself. The GhostMetrics tracker is under 3KB gzipped and served from Cloudflare's edge — for context, a full Google Analytics load is 45KB and up. A lighter script is a small but real win for the same Web Vitals you're trying to measure.
Export and sharing (Pro). Public shareable dashboards let a client or teammate view numbers without a login, and CSV export gets your data into a spreadsheet when you need it. Both are Pro-tier.
The honest caveat: the GhostMetrics dashboard is hosted and closed-source. Only the tracker script is public and auditable — the same arrangement Fathom and Simple Analytics use. If the dashboard being open-source is a hard requirement, that points you toward Plausible or Umami, and we'll get to that.
The reason you're comparing cookieless tools at all is that you don't want a consent banner or a pile of personal-data liability. Fathom, GhostMetrics, Simple Analytics, and Plausible are all cookieless by default, which in most cases means no cookie-consent banner is required for basic traffic analytics. Always confirm current defaults with each vendor, but that's the shared baseline. If the underlying mechanics are new to you, we wrote a plain-language explainer on how cookieless tracking works.
Because it's the product we can describe in full detail, here's exactly how GhostMetrics handles a visitor — so you can hold any alternative to the same standard of specificity:
/gm.js, so you (or a skeptical security reviewer) can read exactly what runs in the browser.Location data is derived at Cloudflare's edge — country, region, and city — with the IP discarded on the spot; city is the finest granularity ever recorded. That's more than enough for a "where's my traffic from" map and far less than what an IP-logging platform retains.
The takeaway isn't "GhostMetrics is the only private option" — Fathom's posture is also strong, and that's part of why people like it. The takeaway is that "cookieless" is a floor, not a finish line: ask any tool you're evaluating what it stores, for how long, and whether it honors GPC/DNT. If a vendor can't answer as specifically as the list above, that's a signal.
Where your analytics run, and where the data physically lives, is a real decision for some teams and a non-issue for others. Be honest with yourself about which camp you're in before you let it drive the choice.
If hosted-and-managed is fine for you, Fathom, GhostMetrics, and Simple Analytics are all hosted services — you drop in a script and never think about servers, upgrades, or uptime. That's the right trade for most small teams: analytics is not a system you want to babysit. GhostMetrics runs on Cloudflare's US edge by default, which keeps the tracker fast and close to visitors worldwide, and it's dogfooded on Null Agency's own sites, so the people who build it look at its dashboards every day.
If you need data in the EU, the picture is more nuanced. GhostMetrics runs on US Cloudflare by default, with EU data residency available on request rather than as a self-serve toggle — so if you have a firm, contractual EU-residency requirement, ask before you commit, and get the arrangement in writing. Some teams are perfectly served by the default; others have procurement rules that make residency non-negotiable. Know which you are.
If self-hosting is the point, then a hosted tool — Fathom or GhostMetrics alike — isn't what you want, and we won't pretend otherwise. Self-hosting means the data never leaves your infrastructure, you control the region absolutely, and there's no third party in the loop at all. That's a legitimate requirement for regulated industries and privacy-maximalist teams. The trade is that you now run, patch, and scale the thing yourself. If that trade is worth it to you, the hosted options on this page are the wrong shelf — look at the open-source tools in the next section.
The short version: hosted tools win on convenience, self-hosted tools win on control, and "EU residency" is a question to ask each vendor directly rather than assume. There's no universally correct answer here — only the one that matches your obligations.
We'd rather send you to the right tool than oversell ours. If GhostMetrics isn't the fit, these are the cookieless alternatives most worth your time — described fairly, with no invented pricing. Check each vendor's site for current numbers.
Plausible. Probably the best-known privacy-first, cookieless analytics tool, and open-source. You can pay for their hosted cloud (volume-tiered) or self-host it yourself for full control over the data and region. If an open-source dashboard is a hard requirement — not just the tracker, the whole thing — Plausible is the default recommendation, and it's a genuinely good product. If you're weighing it specifically, we keep a dedicated rundown of Plausible alternatives that applies just as well when Plausible is the incumbent you're comparing against.
Umami. Open-source and free to self-host, with a hosted cloud option if you don't want to run it. It's lightweight, cookieless, and popular with developers who are comfortable standing up their own instance. The trade is the usual self-hosting one: you own the uptime. If you already have a Postgres database and a place to run a container, Umami is a low-friction, no-license-cost choice.
Simple Analytics. A hosted, cookieless, privacy-first tool in the same family as Fathom — clean dashboard, no consent banner, volume-based pricing. If you like Fathom's approach but want to compare a close peer before deciding, Simple Analytics is the most direct apples-to-apples look.
A note on where GhostMetrics itself sends people. This isn't marketing spin: if open-source self-hosting or strict EU residency is a hard requirement, GhostMetrics' own docs point users to Plausible, Umami, or Simple Analytics instead. We'd rather you land somewhere that fits than churn in a month. Use the flat-price, free-tier pitch when it matches your situation, and ignore it when it doesn't.
Here's the decision, stripped of sales gloss.
Stay on Fathom if: your traffic is stable and comfortably inside a tier you're happy paying for; you value a mature, boring-in-a-good-way tool that just works; and you don't need a permanent free tier. There is no prize for switching tools you already like. Fathom is a strong product, and "it fits my budget and my brain" is a complete reason to keep it.
Switch to GhostMetrics if: you run multiple sites and want one flat $9.99/mo instead of a meter; you want a real free-forever tier for a single site with unlimited pageviews and the full dashboard; you specifically want Core Web Vitals by page and device sitting next to your traffic data; or your traffic is spiky and you're tired of volume tiers turning a good month into a bigger invoice. The flat price is the headline, but the Web Vitals integration is the sleeper reason engineering-minded teams stay.
Go open-source (Plausible / Umami) if: the dashboard being open-source is non-negotiable, or you need to self-host so data never leaves your infrastructure. Hosted tools — Fathom and GhostMetrics both — can't satisfy that, and we won't pretend they can.
Ask about residency first if: EU data residency is contractual. GhostMetrics offers it on request rather than as a toggle, so get the arrangement confirmed before you migrate; if strict EU residency is a blocker, a self-hosted EU deployment of Plausible or Umami is the cleaner path.
The cheapest way to decide is to look before you leap. Open the live demo — no signup, no card — and click through all 11 tabs on real data. If it feels right, moving one site to the free tier costs nothing and takes minutes. If it doesn't, you've lost five minutes and you know exactly why you're staying on Fathom, which is its own kind of useful.
Cookieless, no consent banner, Core Web Vitals by page and device, and a real free tier — built and run by Null Agency, dogfooded on our own sites. See everything on the public demo first; there's no signup and no card to look around.
See the full dashboard on the no-signup live demo, then start free on one site.
Start Free on One Site Open Live DemoDisclosure: GhostMetrics is built and operated by Null Agency, the publisher of this article — so we're not a neutral party about it. We've kept every claim about GhostMetrics to what the product actually does, quoted no competitor pricing we couldn't verify, and pointed you to open-source and self-hosted alternatives wherever they'd fit your needs better. Fathom, Plausible, Simple Analytics, and Umami are independent products; check each vendor's site for current pricing and features.