Comparison

Ripples vs Fathom Analytics

Fathom is the most deliberately simple tool in this category. One screen, no configuration, no cookie banner, EU isolation available, and a company that has been profitable and independent for years. It also has no free plan and no connection to your billing provider, so it will never tell you which channel produced revenue. Pick Fathom if you want privacy-first traffic analytics that takes zero thought. Pick Ripples if you want the same simplicity applied to the question of whether your acquisition spend pays back.

Checked August 2026 No affiliate links We are biased, and we say where

Choose Ripples if

You want to start free and stay free until you are actually making money
Your question is about revenue and retention, not pageviews
You buy traffic on Google Ads and want the spend joined to the outcome

Choose Fathom if

You want the simplest possible privacy-first traffic dashboard
EU isolation and no cookie banner are hard requirements
You run many sites and want them all on one flat price

Side by side

Ripples and Fathom, row by row.

Prices are the published list prices as of August 2026. The last group is the one where Fathom may well beat us, and it is in the same table as the rest on purpose.

Feature and price comparison between Ripples and Fathom Analytics
Price
	Ripples	Fathom
Entry price	Free until $1K MRR, then $9/mo	$15/mo
What the price meters	100,000 visits and actions a month	100,000 pageviews a month
Free tier	Yes, until $1K MRR	No, 7-day trial
Sites included	1 project, or 10 on the $19 plan	Unlimited sites on every plan
Revenue tracking	Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy	No billing connection
Google Ads spend	Included on every plan	Not available
Money and payback
Revenue from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy	Yes	No
Revenue credited to the channel that brought the customer	Yes	No
Payback period, per channel	Yes	No
Google Ads spend imported	Yes	No
ROAS against real paid revenue	Yes	No
Retention
Retention curves	Yes	No
Retention split by acquisition channel	Yes	No
Traffic
Real-time traffic, referrers and campaigns	Yes	Yes
AI assistant referrals as their own channel	Yes	Shows as a referrer
Telegram Mini Apps and native apps	Yes	Script and events API
What Ripples deliberately does not do
Session replay	No	No
Heatmaps	No	No
Feature flags and A/B tests	No	No
Open source	No	No
Self-hostable	No	No

Prices and features change. If you find a row here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it: a comparison page nobody can trust is worth less to us than no page at all.

The real difference

Fathom made simplicity the product. That has a cost.

Fathom is unusually clear about what it is. One page, a handful of numbers, no funnels, no cohorts, no wizard, nothing to configure. For a lot of sites that is exactly right, and the discipline it took to keep the product that small is genuinely admirable.

The thing that simplicity buys is also the thing it costs. A dashboard with no notion of a customer cannot tell you that the 71 visitors from a newsletter turned into 9 paying accounts worth $261 a month, of whom 7 are still paying in month three. That is not a missing feature in Fathom, it is a different product.

Ripples keeps the same low-configuration promise, one script tag and no event taxonomy to design, and points it at revenue instead of pageviews.

Fathom Analytics public demo dashboard: realtime visitors, site visitors, pageviews, average time on site, bounce rate and event completions in one row, above a traffic chart and two panels listing top pages and referrers. Every number on the screen counts traffic; none counts money. — Fathom Analytics live demo, captured 14 August 2026. Not a mock.

“Do you have a lower or free option? Nope.”

Fathom Analytics pricing FAQ

Being straight with you

Pick Fathom instead if any of this is you.

We would rather you found out here than after installing.

You run a lot of sites

Fathom includes unlimited sites on every plan. Ripples charges by project, 1 or 10, so if you have 40 small sites Fathom is straightforwardly cheaper.

You want zero thinking

Fathom is one screen. There is nothing to learn, nothing to set up, and nothing to get wrong. That is worth real money to some people.

Privacy and EU isolation are the requirement

Fathom has an EU isolation option and a serious, long-standing privacy position. We do not compete on that ground.

You have no recurring revenue

Everything Ripples adds over Fathom depends on money arriving. If nothing is being paid for yet, you are paying for machinery you cannot use.

There is a longer list of things Ripples deliberately does not do on what we don't do.

Questions

Ripples and Fathom, asked plainly.

Does Fathom Analytics have a free plan?

No. Fathom offers a 7-day trial and then starts at $15 a month. Their own pricing FAQ answers the question directly: "Do you have a lower or free option? Nope." Ripples is free until your project reaches $1K MRR.

Can Fathom track Stripe revenue?

Not through a billing connection. Fathom can record events, but it does not connect to Stripe, so subscription revenue arriving over the following months is not attributed back to the channel that brought the customer.

What is the best Fathom Analytics alternative?

It depends what you were using it for. For privacy-first traffic analytics: Plausible, or Umami if you want a free tier. For traffic plus revenue and ad-spend payback on a subscription product: Ripples. For a free self-hosted option: Umami or Matomo.

Can I run Ripples alongside Fathom?

Yes. Both are a single script tag and they do not interfere with each other.

Sources

Checked August 2026. Fathom Analytics is a trademark of its owner and is not affiliated with Ripples. We take no affiliate commission from anyone on this page.