| Functionality | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Fathom is a lightweight web analytics tool. It covers all the essentials for this time of product including real time page view and visitor data, referral source tracking and basic traffic segmentation. However, you'll not find any powerful product analytics functionality like heatmaps or session recordings. Additionally, its self-hosted variant lacks even more features than the cloud hosted option.</span></p> | 7 <p>For a web analytics tool, we were pleasantly surprised by the depth of functionality that Matomo offers. Features such as heatmaps, session replays and scroll depth tracking are all unique when looking at Matomo's competitors. We also appreciate that the tool is open source and can be self-hosted should you wish.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Given its limited feature set and beautiful design, Fathom is particularly easy to use. It would take an average SMB employee less than 20 minutes to master its use.</span></p> | 3 <p>Given the sheer breadth of functionality and dated design, we found Matomo frustrating and confusing to use. Most of its interfaces are non-standard when compared with modern web analytics products and its more powerful features take a lot of effort to fully configure. It would take an average SMB employee several hours to master the platforms use.</p> |
| Look and feel | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Fathom is a well designed analytics tool. Its aesthetic is clean and modern, albeit a bit dark. Additionally, when tested we found page load time to be snappy and responsive (<1s).</span></p> | 2 <p>Matomo's design is very dated. Most interfaces are extremely overwhelming, confusing or clunky. Given the sheer breadth of functionality on offer this isn't exactly surprising. Additionally, we found many pages to be sluggish to load (taking >3 seconds).</p> |
| Customisability | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Beyond custom events, Fathom offers limited scope for customization. We would like to have seen more options to tweak the dashboard itself and change how data is visualized.</span></p> | 7 <p>Matomo offers a lot of scope for customization. From custom reports to A/B tests there are a number of fine tweaks, visualization changes or experiment details which can be fine tuned to get the most out of your analytics experience. Additionally the product is open-source meaning you can self-host it if you wish to.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Like most web analytics products, Plausible was also very simple to implement - requiring only a simple script. Additionally, it offers a self-serve free trial. However, we did find the lack of any free tier frustrating, meaning you'll need to completely delete your account if you don't want to pay.</span></p> | 5 <p>Matomo offers a self-serve free trial like most of the tools in this sector. In terms of setup, most websites will only need to install a simple code snippet to access full functionality. That being said, if you want to take advantage of the more powerful features such as heatmaps, there is a fair amount of additional customization and setup required in the dashboard itself which can take several days.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Fathoms developer documentation is well laid out, easy to digest and detailed. It also offers very strong search functionality too.</span></p> | 3 <p>Like with most analytics tools, developer documentation and knowledge bases are the primary avenue for support. Unfortunately we found Matomos to be poorly laid out and hard to navigate. Beyond that, they offer a ticket system for help queries which take a few days to get responses from.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Fathom offers a robust and well documented API through which you can interact with data programatically. However, it offers little to no integrations beyond this.</span></p> | 7 <p>Matomo offers an extensive API that goes beyond just gathering stats - it also allows you to access live data and make changes to goal/website configuration. Additionally, we were pleased to see easy set up with Google tag manager and BigQuery.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 6 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Fathom offers self-serve export functionality for key datapoints via its web app. Additionally, its API is robust and allows business to access datapoints programatically.</span></p> | 8 <p>Matomo offers self-serve export of key data directly from its web app. Additionally, it also offers a strong API through which you can pull data programatically.</p> |
