Fathom - simple website analytics (Community Edition)

Fathom Analytics is a simpler and more privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

Collecting information on the internet is important, but it’s broken. We’ve become complacent in trading information for free access to web services, and then complaining when those web services do crappy things with that data.

The problem is this: if we aren’t paying for the product, we are the product.

Google Analytics may give you free access to their services but in turn, they’re assembling data profiles on your website visitors, which they can then use for better targeting of advertisements across their network.

We need to stop giving away our data and our users' privacy for free access to a tool.

Fathom respects the privacy of your users and does not collect any personally identifiable information. All while giving you the information you need about your site, so you can make smarter decisions about your design and content.

At present, Fathom Analytics (Community Edition) is not PECR compliant due to the fact that it uses an anonymous cookie. Our PRO version is PECR compliant, and we'll be open-sourcing that codebase close to the end of 2019!

Community Edition vs PRO Edition

We offer a PRO version of Fathom Analytics that starts at $14 / month. You can also self-host our Community Edition on your own server (est. $5 / month).

Open Source	Paid/Hosted
Uses Cookies	Cookie-free
No support (you can post an issue to our repo)	Fast and responsive support from the Fathom founders
No guaranteed uptime	Fully redundant cloud-based architecture that keeps your stats online
Scaling requires you to power down and then upgrade your server	On-demand, automatic scaling, so even if your site goes viral, your stats won’t stop or slow down - we can handle billions of page views each month
Manual backups, if you know how to set them up on your server	Real time backups included in the cost
No data protection	Continuous data protection (in the event of a database hardware failure, we have a live standby database ready to go)
Manual updates, via the command line	Automatic updates, patches and new versions at no extra cost, no coding required
Manual server hardening for security	Totally secure server, monitored and maintained by us, included in the price
You pay for hosting, you have to do all the work to maintain the server, the code and backups	You pay us, we take care of everything for you
Tracker file served via single server, from a single location	Tracker file served via our super-fast CDN, with endpoints located around the world to ensure fast page loads
Data aggregation performed on a single server	Super fast data-aggregation spread across our cloud architecture
Contribute to our repo	Supporting a privacy-focused, indie software company
	Buy now

Installation

Production

You can install Fathom on your server by following our simple instructions.

Development

For getting a development version of Fathom up & running, go through the following steps.

1. Ensure you have Go and NPM installed
2. Download the code: git clone https://github.com/usefathom/fathom.git $GOPATH/src/github.com/usefathom/fathom
3. Compile the project into an executable: make build
4. (Optional) Set custom configuration values
5. (Required) Register a user account: ./fathom user add --email=<email> --password=<password>
6. Start the webserver: ./fathom server and then visit http://localhost:8080 to access your analytics dashboard

Docker

Building

Ensure you have Docker installed and run docker build -t fathom .. Run the container with docker run -d -p 8080:8080 fathom.

Running

To run our pre-built Docker image, run docker run -d -p 8080:8080 usefathom/fathom:latest

Tracking snippet

To start tracking, create a site in your Fathom dashboard and copy the tracking snippet to the website(s) you want to track.

Content Security Policy

If you use a Content Security Policy (CSP) to specify security policies for your website, Fathom requires the following CSP directives (replace yourfathom.com with the URL to your Fathom instance):

script-src: yourfathom.com;
img-src: yourfathom.com;

Roadmap

Find our public roadmap here.

If you have an idea or suggestion for Fathom, submit it as an issue here on GitHub.

Donation

If you're self-hosting Fathom Analytics (Community Edition) and want to support it's development, you can:

Copyright and license

MIT licensed. Fathom and Fathom logo are trademarks of Fathom Analytics.