This article has affiliate links that if you Sign up to use Fathom Analytics I'll make a small percentage, and you'll receive 10$ credit to your first invoice.
I have been using Fathom Analytics since they launched version 2 in October 2019, I wasn't sure I was going to carry on after my trial expired but I haven't cancelled and have no plans to! In the following article, I want to talk a bit about why I use Fathom and provide a review so far.
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Fathom Analytics is a completely privacy-focused solution to website analytics. It does not track personal information and keeps the interface looking slick with one page to display all of your metrics - such as referrers, screen sizes, bounce rate, duration and more. It offers everything I need from analytics software and all wrapped up into a beautiful interface.
The version 2 launch of Fathom involved a complete rewrite from the ground up, moving away from Go to a system built with Laravel and Ember. The team behind the launch (@JackEllis and @pjrvs) absolutely nailed it and as such the word has been flying around.
I closely followed version 1 after they announced on Product Hunt in 2018 and since then it has been great to see them grow. Often the team will tweet about regular updates to the software, produce detailed blog posts about their learning curve and how they worked with the systems has been revealing, and have even started a podcast to give you some behind the scenes.
I'm not saying the software is perfect but it's a product which is in active development, and it keeps on getting better. A few things I would really like to see come in soon would be:
- A way to block my IP from tracking (or have a browser extension which does so) as it still logs as I check on my site or read my own articles.
- A way to not track hits on test domains (.test, localhost, etc) without me having to wrap everything in conditionals.
- The ability to import my old data from Google Analytics.
With that said, I haven't found a feature I'm missing too much that I used in Google Analytics. Fathom has all my data, my screen sizes, I can set up goals and can see live visitors.
As for pricing, they offer a really fair package starting at $14 per month for unlimited sites and 100,000 page views. To some people that will seem high, but when asked about the price Jack replied back and said this price point was mostly to cover the cost per user and that seems totally fair! Plus, you can always use my handy referral link to get a little bit of credit off your first bill!
When I first started with Fathom, I wasn't sure if I was going to stick around with it and if I'd end up reverting back to Google Analytics, but I haven't cancelled yet and have no real reason to anytime soon! It's a gorgeous piece of software, it shows clear and concise data, it's privacy-focused and it's actively developed openly - I couldn't ask for any more.