Plausible Analytics VS Fathom Analytics

There was a time when open source software meant “functional, but clunky.” That’s changed. Tools like Plausible (analytics), N8N (automation), Umami (web stats), and Vaultwarden (password manager) are beautifully built, stable, and powerful. Many match or even beat their commercial alternatives.

Plausible is a privacy-focused website analytics tool that provides simple, actionable insights into website traffic and visitor behavior. It prioritizes data privacy by offering transparent analytics without cookies, tracking scripts, or personal data collection.

Perfect for companies running under tight EU privacy regulations. Find more: Plausible analytics

In this interview, Marko Saric shared his thoughts on privacy and running a bootstrapped SaaS business. Plausible integration is already available in Open SaaS as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We hope this interview helps you understand the value of such a product, and the nature of running an open source business.

Plausible Analytics (https://plausible.io/) is a lightweight, privacy-focused analytics tool that’s designed to be simple and easy to use. Unlike Google Analytics, Plausible gives you just the metrics you need—without the bloat.

Would this also work with something like Plausible (https://github.com/plausible/analytics) which uses ClickHouse to store web analytics data, or it primarily for log data?

I've actually had this discussion with Plausible directly back in 2022[1], and more recently with the lawyer they had write a blog post on the topic[2]. I wrote an article on it, that was recently discussed here on HN [3].

The response from Plausible is essentially "we've checked with legal council, and stand by the statement". The conversation with the lawyer started out well, but he stopped responding when I asked about the ePD, not GDPR.

There generally seems to be a lot of confusion, even in legal circles, about what ePD requires informed consent for. Many think that only PII requires consent, or think that anonymization bypasses it. That amount of confusion makes it very easy for a layman (e.g. Plausible) to find _someone_ willing to back up their viewpoint.

The EDPB released a guideline in 2023 that explicitly states that what Plausible et al. are doing is covered by the ePD's consent requirement, but that doesn't mean that any of the companies offering it are interested in saying it out loud.

1: https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/1963

Answering your GDPR question: we use cookie-less analytics with https://usefathom.com/ and we do not pass user data to the backend endpoints, which you can verify by viewing the network calls. When you upload the ZIP or CSV the extraction/parsing happens entirely client-side, and then we use auto-generated IDs to map connection data from the JSearch API response to the client-side stored connection data.

Marketed as the simple, lightweight, privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics, Fathom provides essential insights into website traffic and visitor behavior without compromising user privacy.

Fathom is privacy first analytics for the web. According to their site, Fathom is a Google Analytics alternative that doesn’t compromise visitor privacy for data. We revolutionized website analytics by making them easy to use and respectful of privacy laws (like GDPR and more).

4. Fathom Analytics

Fathom Analytics (paid)

A few apps that are a joy to use:

https://ia.net/writer for writing.

https://usecontrast.com/ for checking contrast.

https://sipapp.io/ for picking colors.

https://nova.app/ for editing code.

https://cleanshot.com/ for screenshots.

https://getpixelsnap.com/ for measuring elements on screen.

https://netnewswire.com/ for reading things via RSS.

https://panic.com/transmit/ for file transfers.

https://usefathom.com/ for web analytics.

https://balsamiq.com/ for wireframes.

What else?

There are many good, lightweight, and open-source alternatives to Google Analytics, such as Plausible, Matomo, Fathom, Simple Analytics, and so on. Many of these options are open-source, and can be self-hosted.

Fathom Analytics - https://usefathom.com/blog/import-data-from-google-analytics