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Fathom vs PostHog - Comparison 2025

Fathom vs. PostHog

Last updated on

Reviewed by Camin McCluskey

Stackfix Co-Founder & CTO

CM

PostHog and Fathom serve distinctly different market segments in the analytics space. PostHog is the clear choice for technical teams and growing startups, offering comprehensive product analytics with features like heatmaps, session recordings, and extensive customization options. Its powerful functionality and integration capabilities make it ideal for organizations needing deep insights and scalability.

Fathom, conversely, excels as a simple, easy-to-use web analytics tool, perfect for small businesses seeking basic traffic insights without complexity. While PostHog offers superior functionality and customization, Fathom's strength lies in its accessibility and quick learning curve.

Fathom Product Logo

Advantages of Fathom

Fathom is significantly easier to use than PostHog
While PostHog can be overwhelming with its complexity, Fathom's streamlined interface allows average SMB employees to master it in under 20 minutes. This makes it ideal for small businesses that need quick insights without a steep learning curve.
PostHog Product Logo

Advantages of PostHog

PostHog is vastly more functional than Fathom
PostHog offers significantly more comprehensive functionality than Fathom, including advanced features like heatmaps, session recordings, and automatic event capture. This makes it ideal for teams needing deep product analytics capabilities beyond basic web analytics.
PostHog offers superior customization options compared to Fathom
Unlike Fathom's limited customization options, PostHog allows extensive customization of reports, metrics, and even self-hosting capabilities. This makes it perfect for technical teams requiring flexible analytics solutions.
PostHog provides superior technical support compared to Fathom
While Fathom offers basic documentation, PostHog provides best-in-class developer documentation and a thriving open-source community that responds to technical questions within 24 hours. This makes it ideal for development teams needing reliable support.
PostHog offers superior data export and integration capabilities
Unlike Fathom's basic export functionality, PostHog provides comprehensive integration options with data warehouses, CRMs, CDPs, and customer support tools, plus robust API access. This makes it perfect for businesses needing to connect analytics with their wider tech stack.

Fathom is best for

  • Businesses with basic web analytics needs seeking a privacy-focused, lightweight Google Analytics alternative
  • Who need a clean, modern interface that's quick to master
  • And/or who need robust privacy compliance with GDPR and SOC 2 Type II certification

PostHog is best for

  • Businesses with technical teams seeking a comprehensive open-source analytics platform
  • Who need comprehensive automatic event tracking without manual setup
  • And/or who need advanced visualization tools like heatmaps and session replays in one platform

Fathom is less good for

  • Businesses with complex product analytics requirements needing features like heatmaps, session replays, or funnel analysis
  • Who need extensive dashboard customization and reporting capabilities beyond basic web analytics
  • And/or who need advanced data warehouse integrations like BigQuery or Snowflake

PostHog is less good for

  • Businesses with non-technical teams who need simple, non-developer focused analytics
  • Who need simplified form analytics and conversion tracking
  • And/or who need a streamlined, simplified interface without technical complexity

Gallery

Fathom logoFathom
Fathom screenshot
PostHog logoPostHog

Pricing, features & ratings

Fathom logo

Fathom

Starting at

$15

Billed monthly

Pricing calculatorVisit Website
PostHog logo

PostHog

Starting at

$0

event / month

Billed monthly

Pricing calculatorVisit Website
Stackfix Verdict
Functionality
3

Functionality

3/10

<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>
10

Functionality

10/10

<p>PostHog's functionality range is the best on the market. It excels in richness in nearly every category from automatic event capture to heatmaps to session replay recordings.</p>
Ease of Use
8

Ease of Use

8/10

<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>
5

Ease of Use

5/10

<p>PostHog’s web app can feel overwhelming due to the sheer number of controls and limited in-product guidance (e.g. tooltips or hints). Less experienced users often end up a bit lost. For example, on the Web Analytics tab, there are ~50 controls - most of which are undefined, and some (e.g. 'Paths' and 'Correlation Analysis') which even confused even fairly experienced users.</p><p>That said, inside specific areas - like session replays - controls and charts are much easier to use.</p>
Look and feel
7

Look and feel

7/10

<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 (&lt;1s).</span></p>
7

Look and feel

7/10

<p>PostHog's design aesthetic is warm and quirky. Given the sheer breadth of functionality, they do a good job of presenting information clearly, though we would have preferred a touch more simplicity. When tested, pages and charts were extremely fast to load (&lt;1s).</p>
Customisability
3

Customisability

3/10

<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>
8

Customisability

8/10

<p>PostHog is one of the most customizable tools on the market. Everything from reports, to custom metrics to self-hosting is possible with this tool.</p>
Ease of Setup
5

Ease of Setup

5/10

<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>
7

Ease of Setup

7/10

<p>PostHog offers a self-serve product with a very generous free tier. Additionally, it was one of the first products to pioneer automatic event capture, meaning it's pretty simple to get value from the product after installing a simple script. That being said, the onboarding process is very developer centric so is best suited to technical team members.</p>
Customer Support
7

Customer Support

7/10

<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>
9

Customer Support

9/10

<p>As with the majority of tools in the space, the primary means for support will come from developer documentation. PostHog's docs are best in class. Additionally, thanks to a thriving open-source developer ecosystem, its forums are lively and a great way to get answers to technical questions in less than 24 hours.</p>
Integratability
4

Integratability

4/10

<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>
10

Integratability

10/10

<p>PostHog offers one of the widest arrays of integrations we've tested covering everything from data warehouses, to CRMs, to CDPs and even customer support tools. They also offer a great API through which you can interact with the product programatically.</p>
Ease of Migration
6

Ease of Migration

6/10

<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>
9

Ease of Migration

9/10

<p>PostHog offers self-serve export functionality within its web app. It also offers a very robust and well documented API through which you can interact with data from the product directly.</p>
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