JustAnalytics vs Plausible vs Fathom: An Honest Comparison

So you've decided to ditch Google Analytics. Good. Whether it's the GDPR headaches, the bloated interface, or the creeping feeling that your visitors' data is feeding an ad model somewhere — you're done. We get it. We built JustAnalytics for the same reasons.

But now you've got a different problem: which privacy-focused analytics tool do you actually pick? Plausible, Fathom, and JustAnalytics are the three names that keep surfacing, and they're similar enough that the decision isn't obvious.

We're going to be straight with you. We built one of these products, so we've obviously got a bias. But we also use Plausible and Fathom on test sites, we track their changelogs, and we talk to users who've switched between all three. Here's what we've found — including the places where our competitors genuinely beat us.

Quick Verdict

Short version: Plausible is the most mature product with the best community and an open-source option. Fathom has the slickest UI and strongest brand in the space. JustAnalytics is the cheapest, handles custom events better than both, and is the only one that's genuinely free for small sites. Pick based on what matters most to you.

Feature Comparison

Feature	JustAnalytics	Plausible	Fathom
Pricing (starting)	Free up to 10K views/mo	$9/mo (10K views)	$15/mo (100K views)
Cookie-free tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes
GDPR compliant (no consent banner)	Yes	Yes	Yes
EU data hosting	Yes (Frankfurt)	Yes (EU-owned infra)	No (Canada-based)
Custom events	Unlimited on all plans	Limited on lower tiers	Unlimited on all plans
Goal/conversion tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes
UTM tracking	Yes	Yes	Yes
API access	Yes (all plans)	Yes (all plans)	Yes (paid plans)
Self-hosting option	No	Yes (open-source)	No
Team members	Unlimited	3 on starter, unlimited on growth	Unlimited
Script size	0.8 KB	1.0 KB	1.2 KB
Real-time dashboard	Yes (5-sec delay)	Yes (near real-time)	Yes (near real-time)
Data retention	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Uptime SLA	99.9%	99.9%	99.9%

Right off the bat — these tools are more alike than different. All three ditch cookies, all three skip the consent banner requirement under GDPR, and all three give you a clean dashboard that loads in under a second. The differences are in the details.

Where Plausible Wins: Community and Self-Hosting

We need to be upfront about this: Plausible is the most established tool on this list, and for good reason.

Their open-source option is a genuine advantage that we can't match. If you want to run analytics on your own server (and you should know what you're getting into — it's not zero maintenance), Plausible is the only realistic option among these three. They've got solid Docker docs, a dedicated community that helps on GitHub, and the self-hosted version gets feature parity with cloud within a few weeks of each release.

We've talked to users running self-hosted Plausible for organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements — German companies where the compliance team won't approve any third-party hosting, period. It works. Setup takes about 3 hours including ClickHouse configuration, and it's been stable for people running it 6+ months.

Plausible's community is also the biggest. Their public roadmap gets real engagement, feature requests get actual responses, and their blog puts out genuinely useful content about privacy regulation. When the CJEU issued updated guidance on analytics consent in November 2025, Plausible had a breakdown post within 48 hours. That kind of responsiveness matters when your compliance depends on your analytics vendor.

Where Plausible falls short (our honest take): Custom events on their Starter plan ($9/mo) are limited to 5 goals. For a marketing site with a few CTAs, that's fine. For a SaaS product where you want to track onboarding steps, feature usage, upgrade prompts, and support interactions? Not enough. You'll need their Growth plan at $19/mo, and even then, Plausible treats custom events as a secondary feature rather than a core one.

Where Fathom Wins: Polish and Brand Trust

Fathom looks like the kind of product a designer founded. Because they did — Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis built it, and Paul's design sensibility shows in every pixel. The dashboard is beautiful. Not just "clean analytics tool" beautiful. Genuinely pleasant to look at.

That might sound superficial. It's not. We've talked to users who check their analytics daily. If the tool feels good to use, they actually use it. Fathom gets opened. There's a difference.

Fathom also has the strongest brand in this space. They've been doing privacy-focused analytics since 2018, well before it became trendy, and they've built a loyal following through Paul's writing and their transparent approach. When someone asks "can we trust this company to stick around?" — Fathom's track record is the easiest to point to.

Their UTM tracking and campaign measurement are slightly more polished than ours, and their email reports are the best-formatted of the three. Minor detail, but the kind of thing that matters when reports get forwarded to executives.

Where Fathom falls short: Pricing and data location. At $15/month for 100K pageviews, Fathom is the most expensive starting option — though that 100K threshold is generous and most small sites won't outgrow it quickly. The bigger issue for European users is that Fathom is a Canadian company processing data in Canada. Yes, Canada has an adequacy decision from the EU, so it's technically GDPR-compliant. But "technically compliant" and "makes your German DPO comfortable" are different things. We've heard from users who rejected Fathom purely on data location — not because it was illegal, but because internal policies required EU-based processing.

Where JustAnalytics Wins: Custom Events and Pricing

Okay, this is the part where we talk about ourselves. We'll try to keep it honest.

The free tier is real. Up to 10,000 pageviews per month, no credit card required, no "free trial that expires," no feature gating. For a personal blog, a portfolio site, or an early-stage startup — it's genuinely free and it includes custom events, API access, and the same dashboard as paid plans. Neither Plausible nor Fathom offers anything comparable at the free level.

Custom events are where we think we pull ahead. Unlimited custom events on every plan, including free. The event API is a single JavaScript call, and you can set up funnels and conversion paths without workarounds. We've had users track 7-step SaaS onboarding flows with custom events in about 20 minutes, with the funnel visualization working out of the box. On Plausible, the same setup requires their Growth plan and some custom property workarounds. On Fathom, it's doable but the UI for analyzing event sequences isn't as clean.

That custom-event flexibility is also why teams running paid ads pair JustAnalytics with click fraud detection — we've seen ClickzProtect users wire ad-click events into JustAnalytics to spot fraud patterns by hour and source. And teams running pay-per-call ads use it alongside VeloCalls to track which traffic sources actually drive qualified phone conversions.

Data hosting is in Frankfurt (AWS eu-central-1), which makes the GDPR conversation straightforward. No adequacy decisions to explain, no transfer impact assessments.

Where we fall short (and we know it): Maturity. We're the newest of the three, launched in mid-2025, and it shows in places. Our documentation has gaps — there was a whole section on API filtering that just said "coming soon" until recently, which was embarrassing. The community is small — no open-source ecosystem, no third-party plugins, no Stack Overflow answers when you hit an edge case. And our changelog, while active, sometimes ships features that feel 80% done. The real-time dashboard has a 5-second delay that Plausible and Fathom don't have — not a dealbreaker, but it's noticeable in side-by-side testing.

We also don't offer self-hosting. For some organizations, that's a hard no. We get it.

Pricing Breakdown (as of April 2026)

JustAnalytics:

• Free: 10K pageviews/mo, all features
• Starter: $6/mo — 50K pageviews
• Growth: $14/mo — 200K pageviews
• Business: $28/mo — 1M pageviews
• Custom pricing above 1M

Plausible:

• Starter: $9/mo — 10K pageviews (5 custom goals)
• Growth: $19/mo — 100K pageviews (unlimited goals)
• Business: $39/mo — 1M pageviews
• Self-hosted: free (your own server costs)

Fathom:

• $15/mo — 100K pageviews (all features)
• $25/mo — 500K pageviews
• $45/mo — 2M pageviews
• Custom enterprise pricing available

No hidden fees on any of these. No overage charges that catch you off guard — all three either block tracking when you hit the limit or let you upgrade. Fathom actually lets you go slightly over without penalty, which is a nice touch.

Worth noting: if you're on Plausible's self-hosted plan, your costs are whatever your server costs. We've seen setups running on a $10/month Hetzner VPS for sites up to 500K pageviews. Hard to beat on price if you don't mind the maintenance.

Who Should Pick What

You're a freelancer or blogger with under 10K monthly pageviews: JustAnalytics. Free tier, full features. Plausible's cheapest plan is $9/mo for the same traffic level — why pay if you don't have to?

You're a European company with strict data sovereignty requirements: Plausible (self-hosted) or JustAnalytics (EU-hosted cloud). If self-hosting is an option and you have the ops capacity, Plausible gives you total control. If you want managed hosting in the EU without the maintenance, JustAnalytics is the simpler path.

You're an agency managing multiple client sites: Fathom or Plausible. Both have mature multi-site management. Fathom's UI makes client reporting easier. Plausible's dashboard sharing is slightly more flexible. We can do this but our multi-site management is still catching up — we'd be dishonest to claim otherwise.

You're a SaaS product tracking user behavior beyond pageviews: JustAnalytics. The custom events and funnel tracking are ahead of the other two for product analytics use cases. Though if you need something even more powerful, consider PostHog or Mixpanel — all three of us are website analytics first, product analytics second.

You want the safest, most established choice: Plausible. Longest track record, biggest community, open-source escape hatch. It's the safe pick, and sometimes safe is exactly right.

Our Honest Take

There isn't a wrong choice here. We know that sounds like a cop-out from a company that clearly wants you to pick them — but we genuinely believe all three are good products.

If you're evaluating right now, here's what we'd say: try the free tiers or trials. All three offer enough to evaluate within a week. Install them side by side on a test site if you're thorough. The "feel" of the dashboard matters more than any comparison table, because you'll be looking at it regularly.

The contrarian take: the privacy analytics space is getting commoditized. All three products are converging on the same feature set. In 18 months, the differentiator won't be features — it'll be ecosystem, integrations, and support. Pick the team you trust and you'll be fine.

We think we're that team. But we're biased. You should probably verify. More posts like this on the JustAnalytics blog.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which privacy-first analytics tool has the best free tier in 2026?

JustAnalytics offers the most generous free tier (10K monthly events with full feature access). Plausible has no free tier — only a 30-day trial. Fathom offers a 7-day trial. If you want to test for real before committing, JustAnalytics is the only one that lets you run production traffic for free indefinitely on a small site.

Do Plausible, Fathom, or JustAnalytics need a cookie consent banner?

No — none of the three require a cookie banner under GDPR or ePrivacy. All three are cookieless by design and don't store personal identifiers. That's the entire point. You can drop any of them on a European-hosted site and skip the consent flow entirely. (You may still want a privacy policy entry, but no banner pop-up is required.)

Can I migrate from Google Analytics 4 to JustAnalytics without losing historical data?

You can run both in parallel for a transition period (typical advice: 30-60 days), so you keep GA4 history while JustAnalytics builds its own. Direct historical-data import isn't possible for any privacy-first tool because GA4 stores aggregated identifiers we don't accept. Most teams export GA4 to BigQuery for archival and start fresh on the new platform.

Which is cheapest at 1M monthly pageviews?

At 1M pageviews per month: JustAnalytics is around $19-29/month, Plausible is $19/month, Fathom is $24/month. Pricing is roughly equivalent at this volume. The cost decision really kicks in at 10M+ pageviews where Plausible jumps to $69 and Fathom to $94, while JustAnalytics stays in the $39-59 range.