Plausible vs Fathom vs Simple Analytics: An Honest Comparison

We make an analytics tool, and it is not in this comparison. Ripples answers a different question (which channels bring paying customers who stay) and if traffic analytics is what you want, one of these three is a better fit than we are. That is worth stating at the top, because a three-way comparison written by a fourth vendor is exactly the sort of thing you should be suspicious of.

All three are privacy-first, cookieless by default, EU-friendly, fast, and pleasant. Their feature lists rhyme. Four things separate them.

The table

Checked August 2026. All three price on a slider, so figures below are the tier most small products land on.

Difference 1: only one of them is free

Simple Analytics has a free plan that does not expire. Unlimited pageviews under a fair use policy, capped at 30 days of history.

Plausible and Fathom both have trials, not free plans, and Fathom is unusually blunt about it. Their pricing FAQ asks "Do you have a lower or free option?" and answers "Nope, and here's why", followed by a paragraph about infrastructure costs. Whatever you think of the position, they are not hiding it.

Thirty days of history is a real limitation, not a technicality. You cannot compare this month against last quarter, and you cannot look at a seasonal pattern at all. But for a side project, or for the first six months of something new, a free tool that keeps a rolling month is genuinely useful, and it is the only free option among the three.

Difference 2: only one of them is open source

Plausible is AGPL. You can read the code, and you can self-host it for free at any volume. That matters in two situations: a hard data-residency requirement that hosting elsewhere cannot satisfy, and a preference for not depending on a company continuing to exist.

The self-hosted version is not identical to the cloud one and lags on some features, which is normal for this model and worth checking before you commit.

Fathom and Simple Analytics are both closed and hosted only. Neither pretends otherwise.

Difference 3: the price crossover at 100k pageviews

At low volume Plausible is the cheapest by a distance: $9 a month for 10,000 pageviews against $15 as Fathom's floor.

At 100,000 pageviews they swap. Fathom is still $15 and Plausible is around $19. Simple Analytics sits near $19 as well.

So the ranking depends entirely on your traffic, and the two tools cross somewhere in the tens of thousands of pageviews. If you are choosing on price, check both sliders at your actual number rather than comparing headline prices, because the headline comparison gives you the wrong answer above about 30,000 pageviews.

Site limits also differ between plans and all three vendors have changed them. If you run several sites, that is the row to check before the price row.

Difference 4: what each one is opinionated about

This is the least quantifiable difference and probably the one you will care about in six months.

Fathom is opinionated about simplicity. One screen. Almost nothing to configure, almost nothing to learn, almost nothing to get wrong. The discipline it took to keep a product this small for this long is genuinely rare, and if you want analytics you never have to think about, this is the one.

Plausible is opinionated about ownership and openness. Open source, EU-owned, a public track record of refusing to bloat the product, and a company that writes at length about why. It is also the one with the most depth of the three: goals on every plan, funnels and custom properties on Business, and a revenue goal feature if you sell things directly.

Simple Analytics is opinionated about accessibility. The free tier is the clearest expression of it, and the AI assistant that answers questions about your data in plain language is the other. Whether that assistant is useful or a novelty depends on how often you have a question you cannot answer by looking at the screen.

What none of them will do

All three are traffic analytics. That means the same three gaps, by design rather than by omission:

They cannot connect to your billing provider. Plausible's revenue goals attribute revenue you send to a goal, which works for a one-off purchase and does not describe a subscription paying you monthly for two years.

They cannot see ad spend. If you run Google Ads or Meta Ads, reconciling spend against outcomes is a manual job in all three.

They have no retention or cohort reporting. There is no way to ask whether the customers a channel brought in March are still around in June, because none of them know who your customers are.

If those gaps are the reason you are reading a comparison at all, none of these three is your answer and neither is switching between them. That is the problem we work on, and the honest version of that comparison says where Plausible beats us.

Picking one

Pick Plausible if you want open source, might self-host, are under about 30,000 pageviews, or want goals and funnels without moving to a product analytics platform.

Pick Fathom if you are above about 30,000 pageviews, run several sites, and want a product that asks nothing of you.

Pick Simple Analytics if you need free, or if 30 days of rolling history is genuinely all you look at.

Honestly, at the volumes most readers of this are at, any of the three will do the job and the difference in outcome is close to zero. If you are stuck, the free one costs nothing to try and you can move later. It is a script tag.

Sources

• Plausible pricing and Plausible on GitHub
• Fathom Analytics pricing, including the FAQ quoted above
• Simple Analytics pricing
• Nine Google Analytics alternatives with real prices

All three vendors change pricing without notice. Click through before deciding. If a figure here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.