All three are cookieless. None of them are priced, hosted, or built the same way. Here's the pricing, the hosting model, the open-source status, the multi-site limits, and the one panel only one of them ships.
Plausible, Fathom, and GhostMetrics are all cookieless, but they sell access to that data three completely different ways: a usage-tier subscription with no free plan (Plausible), a usage-tier subscription bundling many sites, also no free plan (Fathom), and a free-forever single-site plan plus a fixed-price Pro tier (GhostMetrics).
Jump to five questions that settle the decision, or the full table below if you want every row at once.
The three tools price analytics access in fundamentally different shapes, and the shape matters more than the sticker price once you know your traffic and how many sites you run.
Plausible has no free plan. It offers a 30-day free trial with no credit card required, after which the Starter tier runs from $9/month for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews, with higher tiers scaling up as your pageview volume grows — check Plausible's current pricing page for the exact breakpoints above Starter.
Fathom also has no free plan, with a shorter 7-day trial. Its entry tier starts at $15/month for up to 100,000 monthly pageviews, and tiers scale by pageviews — $290/month at up to 15 million monthly pageviews, $470/month at up to 25 million, with custom pricing above 25M. The detail worth knowing if you run several small sites: every Fathom plan includes 50 sites, with more available in packs of 50 — a site allowance most usage-priced analytics tools don't offer. Fathom also advertises full analytics history while subscribed, so your data isn't rolling off after a fixed window as long as you keep paying.
GhostMetrics skips the trial-then-pay model for a single site. The free plan is free forever: one website, unlimited pageviews, a real-time dashboard, every dashboard view, and full history — no card, no trial clock, nothing to cancel. If you need more than one site or a public dashboard URL, Pro is $9.99/month flat, unlimited pageviews, unlimited websites (fair-use ceiling of 250) under one login, with a 30-day free trial — a card is required to start it, nothing is charged for 30 days, and you can cancel anytime.
Put plainly: if your traffic is small and steady, Plausible's $9 floor and Fathom's $15 floor both look reasonable next to GhostMetrics' $0 — but GhostMetrics' free tier caps at one site, and neither Plausible nor Fathom offers any free tier at all, trial included. If you're weighing Plausible specifically against a hosted alternative, our Plausible alternatives piece goes deeper on that one comparison; the same goes for Fathom alternatives if Fathom is your starting point.
Plausible processes data EU-only — the company says the data never leaves the EU, a strong pitch if EU data residency is a hard requirement for your organization. Its code is public and auditable.
Fathom is proprietary and hosted only, but it offers an EU-isolation option for teams that need EU-specific processing without needing the source code to be open.
GhostMetrics is hosted on Cloudflare (Workers + D1), served from Cloudflare's edge, but it does not offer an EU-only processing guarantee the way Plausible does. It is not open source and not self-hostable.
None of the three requires you to run your own server — that's the trade-off all three make against something like self-hosted Umami or Matomo. If self-hosting itself is the actual requirement rather than just "cookieless," our Matomo alternatives piece and the broader cookieless analytics comparison cover that ground.
Plausible is open source, and there's a self-hostable Community Edition — check the current CE docs for exactly what it includes, since the hosted and self-hosted feature sets aren't always identical. Plausible also ships an official WordPress plugin.
Fathom is proprietary and not self-hostable — hosted-only, the same hosting model GhostMetrics uses. Fathom ships an official WordPress plugin, though, so a WordPress install there is a plugin activation, not a manual script tag.
GhostMetrics is not open source and not self-hostable, and there is no GhostMetrics WordPress-native plugin. Installing on WordPress means pasting the one script tag into a child theme's header.php, a wp_head action in functions.php, or a snippet plugin from the "insert headers and footers" category — the same install as any other host. On WordPress.com, plugins are available on the paid plans (Personal, Premium, Business, Commerce, per WordPress.com's own support page); whether a given plan lets you add a raw script tag is a WordPress.com question, not a GhostMetrics one — check current WordPress.com docs. Either way, GhostMetrics doesn't know it's running on WordPress: no post-type breakdown, no author breakdown, no WooCommerce revenue — just pages, referrers, UTMs, events, vitals, geography, and devices, the same panels it shows on any site.
If a native WordPress plugin is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, that alone tilts the decision toward Plausible or Fathom.
The table below lines up the features people actually compare once pricing and hosting are settled. Where a competitor publishes no hard number, the table says so.
| Plausible | Fathom | GhostMetrics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | No — 30-day trial, no card | No — 7-day trial | Yes, one site, forever |
| Starting paid price | From $9/mo (10k pageviews) | From $15/mo (100k pageviews) | $9.99/mo flat (unlimited pageviews) |
| Pricing shape | Pageview tiers, scales up | Pageview tiers — $290/mo at 15M, $470/mo at 25M | Flat rate, unmetered |
| Open source | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hostable | Yes (Community Edition) | No | No |
| Data location | EU-only ("never leaves the EU") | EU-isolation option | Cloudflare global edge |
| Multi-site | Multiple sites under one account | 50 sites included per plan | 1 free; unlimited on Pro (fair-use ceiling of 250) |
| Custom events | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| UTM breakdown | Yes | Yes | Yes — source/medium/campaign only, first-touch per session |
| Public dashboards | Yes, shared/public dashboards | Yes, shareable dashboards | Pro only, via Share button |
| Raw export | CSV export | Check current docs | CSV + JSON, every plan including free |
| Core Web Vitals | No | No | Yes — FCP, LCP, CLS, TTFB (no INP) |
| WordPress plugin | Yes, official | Yes, official | No — one script tag |
Two rows are worth a second look. Multi-site favors Fathom outright if you run many small sites — 50 sites on the $15/month entry tier is more site allowance than the other two give you at that price. Export favors GhostMetrics outright: CSV and JSON export are on every plan including free, with no plan gate at all, while Plausible offers CSV export and Fathom's export scope varies by plan.
UTM breakdown is a "yes" for all three, but the mechanics differ underneath. GhostMetrics reads utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign from the landing URL only — utm_term and utm_content are not stored — and attribution is first-touch within a single browser tab: the first UTM set seen is kept in sessionStorage, cleared when the tab closes, and attached to every later pageview and custom event in that session. There's no cross-session or returning-visitor attribution by design. Plausible and Fathom both report UTM breakdowns as a standard feature; check their current docs if you need to know whether their attribution model persists across sessions the way a cookie-based tool like GA4 does.
Custom events also differ in how you wire them up. GhostMetrics offers two paths: add a data-gm-event="signup-click" attribute to any element and clicks are recorded automatically — including elements a client-side router or a modal renders after the page loads, since it's one delegated listener rather than a one-time scan — or call window.ghostmetrics.track('name', { section: 'pricing' }) from your own code, where only a single section field is stored as metadata. There's no numeric value or revenue field on either path, and no per-visitor funnel across sessions. Plausible and Fathom both support goal or custom-event tracking as a standard feature; their setup and metadata models differ from ours in the details.
Neither Plausible nor Fathom ships a Core Web Vitals panel. GhostMetrics shows FCP, LCP, CLS and TTFB in a per-page table, so a slow template shows up as its own row instead of disappearing into a site-wide average. If real-user performance data needs to live next to your traffic numbers, those two tools don't cover it and you'd be reaching for a second product.
GhostMetrics captures FCP, LCP, CLS, and TTFB from real visitors via PerformanceObserver and the Navigation Timing API, with a per-page vitals table in the dashboard. It does not capture INP. TTFB follows Google's definition since 2026-09-11: responseStart measured from navigation start (so redirects, DNS, TCP/TLS, and server time are all included), rated against the 800ms "good" threshold; the dashboard's TTFB average excludes older rows measured under the pre-2026-09-11 definition, though those rows stay in the raw export and are labeled in the accompanying manifest.json.
If Core Web Vitals genuinely matter to your stack and you don't want a third tool just for that, GhostMetrics is the only one of these three that answers it natively. If vitals aren't a requirement, this row doesn't move the decision at all.
Both tools focus on traffic measurement — visitors, pageviews, referrers, geography, devices — and neither publishes a real-user performance panel. Neither ships it today, so if you need vitals, that's GhostMetrics or a dedicated real-user-monitoring tool.
Most teams land on one of these five before they ever open a pricing calculator. If none of the five rules it out for you, the table above is the tie-breaker.
If EU-only residency or an open-source, self-hostable option is the requirement, Plausible is the honest pick. If you run many small client sites on a budget, Fathom's 50-sites-per-plan model is hard to beat starting at $15/month. If you want a free tier on one site, Core Web Vitals, and custom events with no card and no trial clock, that's exactly what GhostMetrics is built for.
Install is one script tag — no plugin, no tag manager, no build step. The free plan is free forever: one site, unlimited pageviews, real-time dashboard, every view, full history. Raw event export as CSV or JSON is available on every plan, including free. Need more than one site or a public dashboard? Pro is $9.99/month flat, unlimited pageviews, unlimited websites (fair-use ceiling of 250), with a 30-day free trial — a card starts the trial, nothing is charged for 30 days, cancel anytime.
Start free — one site, no card See the live demoDeeper look at Plausible's model and who should switch
Where Fathom's pageview-tiered pricing fits, and where it doesn't
Every cookieless option, self-hosted and hosted
The real dashboard, live data
Disclosure: GhostMetrics is built by Null Agency and we use it on this site, so we're not a neutral party about our own product — we've kept the claims to what the free and paid plans actually do, and recommended Plausible or Fathom plainly where they genuinely fit better. Pricing for third-party products can change; always check the vendor's current pricing page before deciding.