Fathom Analytics vs Pirsch Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentPirsch Analytics compared with Fathom Analytics
Fathom bundles unlimited sites and forever data retention on every plan with a famously simple interface and Canadian ownership with EU isolation options. Pirsch is German end to end, cheaper at entry, and considerably deeper on funnels, A/B testing, white labelling, and the API. Choose Fathom for permanent history and minimalism; choose Pirsch if you want agency features and a developer surface at a lower price.
Choose Fathom Analytics if
Agencies, portfolio operators, and marketing teams with many sites who want dead-simple, consent-banner-free traffic and conversion reporting at a flat monthly price, with data retention that never expires.
Choose Pirsch Analytics if
German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fathom Analytics | Pirsch Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $15/mo (up to 100,000 pageviews) (7 days trial) | $6 per month (Standard at 10,000 monthly pageviews) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription tiered by monthly pageview volume; all features on every plan, at least 50 sites included, extra sites in packs of 50. | Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial. |
| Free plan | No | None; the trial is the evaluation path and there is no free hosted tier. |
| Free trial | 7 days | 30 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Agencies, portfolio operators, and marketing teams with many sites who want dead-simple, consent-banner-free traffic and conversion reporting at a flat monthly price, with data retention that never expires. | German and European site owners who want a cookie-free analytics supplier inside their own jurisdiction, developers who want real SDKs and a REST API rather than a stats endpoint, and small agencies who need unlimited white-labelled client dashboards without paying per client. |
| Setup time | Minutes: one script tag or the WordPress plugin, and data is live immediately; events take a few minutes each to add. | Minutes for the script or an SDK integration; funnels, goals, and A/B tests take an hour of deliberate configuration, and serving the script from a custom domain adds a short DNS task. |
| Learning curve | Effectively none; the entire product is one dashboard page plus a settings screen. | Low for the dashboard, moderate for the API and server-side tracking, which is the piece that rewards a developer's involvement rather than a marketer's. |
| Platforms | Web app (cloud), WordPress plugin, Script embed for any site or framework | Web app (German-hosted cloud), JavaScript tracking script, Server-side SDKs, On-premise installation (Enterprise only) |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, PECR | GDPR, ePrivacy and TTDSG, CCPA, Data processing agreement available as standard |
| Founded | 2018 | 2019 |
| Headquarters | British Columbia, Canada (Conva Ventures Inc.), with a small remote team worldwide | Rheda-Wiedenbruck, Germany |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; 100% independently owned, customer-funded, zero investors | Bootstrapped; privately held as Emvi Software GmbH with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Fathom Analytics
Strengths
- Every plan includes at least 50 sites and the full feature set, unmatched economics for agencies and multi-site operators.
- Forever data retention as a standard feature; analytics history survives as long as the subscription does.
- Real-time, genuinely simple one-page dashboard that non-analysts read without training.
- Cookie-free, personal-data-free architecture with EU Isolation, removing consent banners for analytics and easing GDPR/CCPA/ePrivacy/PECR review.
Limitations
- No funnels, user journeys, or any multi-step conversion analysis; measurement depth stops at events and UTM breakdowns, less than Plausible's Business plan offers.
- Closed source: unlike Plausible or PostHog, the privacy claims cannot be verified by reading the code.
- No user-level or account-level analytics of any kind, so product analytics and B2B attribution are out of scope by design.
- No free plan and a short 7-day trial, with published static pricing covering only part of the tier ladder (higher volumes are calculator-only).
Pirsch Analytics
Strengths
- Funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling are all included at $12 a month, which competitors reserve for tiers costing several times that.
- Unlimited websites on the Plus plan makes agency economics work without a per-client subscription.
- German company, German hosting, and a standard data processing agreement give the strongest jurisdictional answer available to a German or Austrian privacy review.
- A genuine developer surface: documented REST API, official SDKs, and server-side event submission, all descended from the original open-source Go library.
Limitations
- No free plan at all, only a 30-day trial, which puts it behind Simple Analytics, Umami Cloud, and GA4 for anyone starting from zero.
- Pageview-based pricing means the $6 and $12 headline figures apply at 10,000 monthly pageviews and rise from there; high-traffic sites need to model the slider.
- Self-hosting is gated to a quote-only Enterprise tier rather than being an open-source option, unlike Umami, Plausible, or Matomo.
- No user-level analytics, replay, retention cohorts, or product analytics by design, which is the permanent cost of the cookie-free architecture.
Pricing compared
Fathom Analytics
Flat monthly subscription tiered by monthly pageview volume; all features on every plan, at least 50 sites included, extra sites in packs of 50.
- Up to 100k pageviews$15
- Up to 500k pageviews$45
- Higher volumes (2M, 10M, 25M+ pageviews)Scales by calculator
Fathom's value case is strongest per site rather than per pageview: $15/month for 50 sites with every feature and permanent retention is the cheapest credible analytics setup an agency or portfolio operator can buy, and the everything-included model avoids Plausible-style feature gating. For a single high-traffic site the math is less special ($45/month at 500k pageviews is more than Plausible's equivalent band), and the absence of funnels or journey analysis means you are paying for simplicity, longevity, and site count, not analytical depth.
Pirsch Analytics
Subscription tiered by feature set (Standard, Plus, Enterprise) with the price scaling by monthly pageview volume from a 10,000-pageview base; no free plan, 30-day trial.
- StandardFrom $6
- PlusFrom $12
- EnterpriseCustom
The $12 Plus plan is the best price-to-capability ratio in privacy-first web analytics for anyone managing more than one site. Unlimited websites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling at that price undercuts Plausible Business and Fathom on the agency use case by a wide margin, and the REST API and SDKs give developers something the others do not. The costs are the absence of a free tier, which makes it a poor fit for hobby projects, and the pageview slider, which means a high-traffic publisher should check the real number before quoting the headline. Judged as an agency or developer tool, it is underpriced; judged as a first analytics install for a site with no revenue, it is the wrong shape.
Editorial verdict on each
Fathom Analytics
Fathom is the pragmatic pick in privacy-first analytics: less ideological than Plausible (closed source, hosted where it is fastest, EU Isolation handling the compliance edge) but structurally more generous, with 50 sites, every feature, and permanent data retention on the cheapest plan. For agencies and anyone running many properties it is the best per-site deal in the category, and the product's refusal to grow past one page is exactly why its users keep it. The boundary is firm, though: no funnels, no journeys, no user or account analytics, so treat it as the traffic-and-conversions layer and pair it with deeper tools when the questions get harder.
Read the full Fathom Analytics profilePirsch Analytics
Pirsch is the best-value tool in privacy-first web analytics for anyone who runs more than one website or writes code. Twelve dollars a month buys unlimited sites, funnels, A/B testing, teams, custom domains, and white labelling, which is a combination the better-known names in this category charge several times more for or do not offer at all, and the REST API and SDKs make server-side tracking a real option rather than a footnote. The German company and German hosting is the cleanest jurisdictional answer on the market for a European privacy review. Two honest caveats: there is no free tier, so a pre-revenue project is better served elsewhere, and self-hosting is an Enterprise contract rather than an open-source right. If you are an agency or a developer, this is the first thing to try in the category.
Read the full Pirsch Analytics profileFathom Analytics profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Pirsch Analytics last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.