Plausible vs Fathom for Solo Developers

Quick Comparison

Plausible Overview

Plausible is a lightweight, open source analytics tool built in Elixir. The script is under 1KB, no cookies are used, and nothing personal is collected. You get a single dashboard with pageviews, sources, top pages, countries, devices, and goals. That's the whole product, and that's the point.

The pricing starts at $9 per month for 10,000 pageviews on the hosted version, which is competitive for small projects. The killer feature for solo developers is that you can self-host it for free if your traffic grows or you want full control. The setup is a single Docker Compose file, and it runs comfortably on a $5 VPS for most personal sites.

Plausible has been steadily adding features that matter without ballooning into something complex. Funnels, custom events, ecommerce revenue tracking, and a public dashboard option all exist now. The product feels like it was built by people who actually use it every day on their own projects.

Fathom Overview

Fathom is the other major privacy-first analytics player, also positioning itself against Google Analytics. The dashboard is clean, the script is small, and the tool is GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant out of the box. Like Plausible, no cookies are required and no personal data is collected.

Pricing starts at $15 per month, which gets you 100,000 pageviews. That's a higher entry price than Plausible, but the included pageview allowance is ten times larger. For a side project that suddenly takes off, Fathom's pricing scales more forgivingly without forcing you to upgrade plans constantly.

Fathom is hosted only. There is no open source version and no self-host option. The founders made a deliberate choice to keep it as a managed product, and the team puts that energy into uptime, support, and polish instead of supporting a community deployment story.

Key Differences

Self-hosting is the headline difference. Plausible Community Edition is fully open source and runs anywhere Docker runs. The core app at plausible/analytics is AGPL-3.0 with 26,603 GitHub stars, and the deployment repo plausible/community-edition (the Docker Compose setup) is MIT-licensed with 2,409 stars. Fathom's current commercial product (v3) is hosted only and closed source by design. There is technically an open source escape hatch named Fathom Lite at usefathom/fathom (MIT, 8,007 stars), but it is the old cookie-based engine the company froze when it went commercial, so it gets bug fixes but no new features. If you want a living, self-hostable, cookie-free analytics stack you can bring in-house later, Plausible is the real choice here.

Pricing structures favor different traffic levels. Plausible's $9 tier starts at 10k pageviews, while Fathom's $15 tier starts at 100k. If you have a handful of small sites with low traffic, Plausible is cheaper. If you have one site that's growing past 50k pageviews per month, Fathom's bigger included bucket actually wins on cost per pageview.

Multi-site handling differs slightly. Both let you track multiple sites under one account. Fathom has a feature called Email Reports that sends a clean weekly summary per site, which is genuinely useful when you have five tiny sites and don't want to log in. Plausible has email reports too, and you can also generate shareable public dashboard links.

Feature depth is roughly equal now. A few years ago Plausible was more bare-bones than Fathom. Today both have funnels, custom events, UTM tracking, goals, revenue tracking, and proper API access. Neither is noticeably more powerful than the other for a typical solo developer use case.

The companies have different vibes. Plausible is developer-first and open source, with public roadmaps and active community contributions. Fathom is founder-led and product-polished, with a strong emphasis on customer support and a more "indie SaaS" feel. Both are excellent companies, just different cultures.

By the Numbers (2026)

Numbers I pulled and checked on 2026-05-29. Sources are listed at the bottom.

Plausible

• Core app license: AGPL-3.0, repo plausible/analytics with 26,603 GitHub stars and 1,562 forks. Created December 2018.
• Latest tagged release: v3.2.1, published 2026-05-15.
• Self-host deploy kit: plausible/community-edition, MIT-licensed, 2,409 stars.
• Hosted entry price: $9/mo Starter for up to 10,000 monthly pageviews and 1 site.
• Mid tier: $14/mo Growth (up to 3 sites and team members, still entry-volume).
• Business tier: from $19/mo, and this is where funnels, revenue tracking, custom properties and the Stats API unlock. One third-party tracker quotes the Business tier landing around $39/mo at 100,000 pageviews, but Plausible does not publish a full per-volume table, so treat anything above the entry bucket as check current pricing.
• Free trial: 30 days, no credit card. Annual billing gives 2 months free.
• Tracking script: 2.5KB gzipped, which the vendor frames as roughly 54 times smaller than Google Analytics.
• Frontend tracker on npm: @plausible-analytics/tracker v0.4.5, 39,597 downloads in the week of 2026-05-21. The older standalone plausible-tracker (v0.3.9) is no longer the recommended package and still pulled 36,275 downloads that same week.

Fathom

• Commercial product (v3): hosted only, closed source.
• Open source legacy: Fathom Lite at usefathom/fathom, MIT-licensed, 8,007 stars, last pushed March 2026. Cookie-based, maintained for bug fixes only, no new features.
• Published pricing is a full ladder, not a hidden quote: $15/mo for up to 100,000 pageviews, $25 for 200k, $45 for 500k, $60 for 1,000,000, $100 for 2M, $140 for 5M, $200 for 10M, then $290, $380, $470 up to 25M, and a custom quote above that.
• Free trial: 7 days, no credit card. Annual billing gives 2 months free (the same effective 17 percent off Plausible offers).
• Tracking script: reported around 1.6KB served from a CDN.
• Frontend helper on npm: fathom-client v3.7.2, 52,884 downloads in the week of 2026-05-21.

The npm download gap is worth a caveat. fathom-client is a community helper that wraps Fathom's script, while @plausible-analytics/tracker is Plausible's first-party library, so the two numbers measure slightly different things rather than a clean popularity contest.

Real Cost at Solo-Dev Scale

Pricing is the one axis where these two genuinely diverge, so here is the actual monthly math instead of a vibe. Two realistic solo-dev workloads, using only the published entry numbers above.

Workload A: three small sites, about 8,000 pageviews each, roughly 24,000 total per month.

• Plausible: 24,000 pageviews sits above the 10k Starter bucket, and three sites needs the Growth tier (Starter is capped at 1 site). Growth starts at $14/mo, with the exact price at 24k pageviews being check current pricing since Plausible does not publish the slider table. Call it from $14/mo.
• Fathom: one account covers unlimited sites, and 24,000 pageviews is comfortably inside the first 100,000-pageview bucket, so it is a flat $15/mo.

At this scale they land within a dollar or two of each other at the entry tiers, and the deciding factor is not price. It is whether you want three sites under Plausible's site cap or one flat Fathom bill that does not care how you split the traffic.

Workload B: one project that took off, about 250,000 pageviews per month.

• Fathom: 250,000 falls in the up-to-500,000 bucket, so it is a flat, published $45/mo. No surprises.
• Plausible: 250k is well past the entry buckets, lands on the Business tier (you would want funnels and the API anyway at that traffic), and the exact figure is check current pricing because the per-volume table is not public. The honest takeaway is that Fathom is the one you can budget to the dollar at this scale, while Plausible needs you to load the pricing slider for your real number.

Annual billing changes both by the same 2-months-free factor, so it does not move the comparison, only the absolute total. Fathom Lite remains the only way to get either tool's bill to literal zero, and only if you accept the frozen cookie-based engine and run the server yourself.

When to Choose Plausible

• You want the option to self-host now or later
• You have multiple small sites and want the cheaper entry tier
• Open source matters to you on principle
• You're comfortable running a Docker container on a VPS
• You want to use Plausible's public dashboard sharing feature

When to Choose Fathom

• You want a hosted-only tool with zero infrastructure to manage
• You have a single growing site that will pass 50k pageviews soon
• You value polished UX and excellent customer support
• You like the weekly email summaries for hands-off monitoring
• You prefer paying a slightly higher fixed cost for more headroom

The Verdict

For most solo developers, I'd pick Plausible. The self-hosting option is a real strategic advantage even if you never use it, and the entry price of $9 is hard to argue with for a personal project or small SaaS just getting started.

Fathom is the better choice if you have a single site that's already getting meaningful traffic and you want a hosted product with great support. The $15 tier comfortably covers 100k pageviews, and the email reports are a small luxury that adds up when you're managing things solo and don't want another dashboard to remember to check.

If you're starting from scratch today with no traffic and no clear growth picture, go with Plausible. You'll pay less while you're small, you can self-host the second you want to, and the feature set is basically equivalent. The only reason to pick Fathom over it is if the polish and support model genuinely matters more to you than the open source story.

Sources

All figures checked on 2026-05-29.

• Plausible hosted pricing, tiers, 30-day trial and annual discount: plausible.io pricing and Plausible subscription plans docs
• Plausible tracking script size (2.5KB gzipped): plausible.io/lightweight-web-analytics
• Plausible Business-tier-at-100k third-party price point (treated as unverified by vendor): analytics-alternatives.com Plausible review
• Plausible core app stars, forks, license, latest release v3.2.1: GitHub API for plausible/analytics
• Plausible Community Edition deploy repo, MIT, stars: GitHub API for plausible/community-edition
• @plausible-analytics/tracker version and weekly downloads: npm registry and npm downloads API
• plausible-tracker (legacy) version and weekly downloads: npm package page and npm downloads API for plausible-tracker
• Fathom full published pricing ladder, 7-day trial, annual discount: usefathom.com/pricing
• Fathom Lite self-host status and license: usefathom.com/pricing/lite and GitHub for usefathom/fathom
• Fathom script size (around 1.6KB): GreyCoder lightweight analytics roundup
• fathom-client version and weekly downloads: npm registry and npm downloads API