Fathom Analytics vs PostHog
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in GTM Analytics for every option we track, with award winners called out.
The short answer
Both sides assessedFathom Analytics compared with PostHog
Fathom sells a $15 flat-rate traffic dashboard; PostHog gives away a web analytics dashboard inside a usage-priced platform that also does product analytics, replay, and experiments. If the website is a brochure, Fathom is simpler and calmer; if the website feeds a product funnel you will eventually want to analyze, PostHog's free tier makes running a separate paid traffic tool hard to justify.
PostHog compared with Fathom Analytics
Fathom and PostHog barely overlap beyond the traffic dashboard: Fathom sells privacy-first simplicity at a flat $15/month, PostHog sells depth on usage pricing that starts free. A content site or agency should buy Fathom; a product team that will ever want funnels, replay, or experiments should start on PostHog's free tier and skip running both.
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 PostHog if
Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Fathom Analytics | PostHog |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $15/mo (up to 100,000 pageviews) (7 days trial) | $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance) |
| 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. | Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features. |
| Free plan | No | 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1M data warehouse rows per month, on 1 project with 1-year retention. |
| Free trial | 7 days (card required; billing starts automatically when the trial ends) | Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial |
| 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. | Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it. |
| Setup time | Minutes: one script tag or the WordPress plugin, and data is live immediately; events take a few minutes each to add. | Minutes to first data with the JS snippet and autocapture; days to weeks to define clean custom events, dashboards, and cohorts; warehouse sources and pipelines are a separate project. |
| Learning curve | Effectively none; the entire product is one dashboard page plus a settings screen. | Low for the web analytics dashboard; moderate for funnels, cohorts, and replay; high for SQL insights, warehouse modeling, and experimentation statistics. |
| Platforms | Web app (cloud), WordPress plugin, Script embed for any site or framework | Web app, JavaScript snippet and web SDK, Server SDKs (Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, and others), Mobile SDKs (iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter), Self-hosted Hobby build (Docker, open source) |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, ePrivacy, PECR, COPPA | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, HIPAA (BAA on Boost, Scale, or Enterprise package) |
| Founded | 2018 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | British Columbia, Canada (Conva Ventures Inc.), with a small remote team worldwide | Remote-first; US-incorporated (San Francisco), team distributed globally |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped; 100% independently owned, customer-funded, zero investors | Venture-backed |
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 Data 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 that requires a card and converts to paid automatically.
PostHog
Strengths
- Breadth with real integration: analytics, replay, flags, experiments, surveys, error tracking, and a warehouse genuinely share one event stream and identity graph rather than being bolted-on acquisitions.
- The most generous free tier in the category, 1M events and 5K recordings monthly, permanently, which makes evaluation and early-stage use genuinely free.
- Open-source codebase plus a choice of US or EU (Frankfurt) cloud gives privacy and procurement teams inspectability and residency options most rivals lack.
- Usage pricing with automatic volume discounts and per-product spending caps scales from hobby project to hundreds of millions of events without a sales call.
Limitations
- No packaged B2B revenue attribution: connecting spend and touchpoints to CRM pipeline and closed-won revenue is a data-warehouse project in PostHog, not a built-in report as in Dreamdata or HockeyStack.
- Depth demands technical investment; non-technical marketers can read the web dashboard but will struggle to self-serve funnels, SQL insights, or warehouse joins.
- Usage-based billing is unpredictable without configured limits, and replay-heavy or autocapture-noisy sites can generate surprising invoices.
- The full event platform carries more GDPR surface than minimalist tools: consent, masking, and retention need deliberate configuration, where Plausible or Fathom are compliant nearly by default.
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 200k pageviews$25
- Up to 500k pageviews$45
- Up to 1M pageviews$60
- Up to 2M pageviews$100
- 5M to 25M pageviews$140 to $470
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 closer ($45/month at 500k pageviews against Plausible's $49 Starter band at the same volume), and the absence of funnels or journey analysis means you are paying for simplicity, longevity, and site count, not analytical depth.
PostHog
Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features.
- Free (no card)$0
- Pay-as-you-goUsage-based
- Platform packages (Boost, Scale, Enterprise)$250 / $750 / $2,000
At small and mid scale PostHog is close to unbeatable on price: the permanent free tiers cover a real startup's entire measurement stack, and the per-unit rates undercut buying analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation separately. The honest caveat is that usage pricing shifts the budgeting burden onto you: a replay-heavy or event-noisy implementation can quietly cost more than a flat-rate point tool, and the platform packages needed for enterprise compliance add a fixed $250 to $2,000 a month. Treat it as extremely cheap by default and only as cheap as your instrumentation discipline at scale.
Editorial verdict on each
Fathom Analytics
Ease of UseFathom is the pragmatic pick in privacy-first analytics: less ideological than Plausible (closed source, hosted where it is fastest, Data 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 profilePostHog
PostHog is the default recommendation in this category for any team with an engineer on it: no rival matches the combination of a free-forever tier that covers real workloads, usage pricing that scales without a sales call, and genuinely integrated replay, flags, and experimentation on top of web and product analytics. The two honest reservations are that marketing teams without technical support will use a fraction of it, and that B2B pipeline attribution, the question GTM leaders most want answered, remains a do-it-yourself exercise on PostHog's warehouse rather than a shipped feature. Buy it as the behavioral system of record; budget separately if you need turnkey revenue attribution.
Read the full PostHog profileFathom Analytics profile last reviewed 2026-09-27; PostHog last reviewed 2026-09-27. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Fathom Analytics and PostHog?
Fathom sells a $15 flat-rate traffic dashboard; PostHog gives away a web analytics dashboard inside a usage-priced platform that also does product analytics, replay, and experiments. If the website is a brochure, Fathom is simpler and calmer; if the website feeds a product funnel you will eventually want to analyze, PostHog's free tier makes running a separate paid traffic tool hard to justify.
Is Fathom Analytics or PostHog cheaper?
Fathom Analytics starts at $15/mo (up to 100,000 pageviews) (7 days trial). PostHog starts at $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Fathom Analytics 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. PostHog pricing model: Usage-based pricing per product: every product has a monthly free allowance, then per-unit billing (per event, recording, flag request, survey response, or row) with steep volume discounts; optional platform packages add support and compliance features.
Does Fathom Analytics or PostHog have a free plan?
Fathom Analytics has no free plan. Trial terms: 7 days (card required; billing starts automatically when the trial ends). PostHog has a free plan. 1M analytics events, 5K session recordings, 1M feature-flag requests, 100K exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, and 1M data warehouse rows per month, on 1 project with 1-year retention. Trial terms: Not applicable; the free tier is permanent, not a trial.
Who should choose Fathom Analytics?
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.
Who should choose PostHog?
Engineering-led SaaS and product teams that want web analytics, product analytics, replay, flags, and experimentation consolidated in one usage-priced platform, and that are comfortable doing their own revenue-attribution modeling if they need it.
What are the best alternatives to Fathom Analytics and PostHog?
SaaSTracker profiles 16 products in GTM Analytics. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Google Analytics 4 (Category Leader), Umami (Best Value), HockeyStack (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
