| Functionality | 4 <p>Google Analytics excels at website visitor tracking but struggles with product analytics. It offers solid traffic analysis and acquisition data but falls short on user behavior insights. Its real power comes from Google Ads integrations and benchmarking functionality.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Use | 3 <p>GA4 is surprisingly difficult to use despite its popularity. Finding basic metrics often requires hunting through multiple screens. The learning curve is steep, and the recent redesign has only made things worse by disrupting established workflows.</p> | 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> |
| Look and feel | 2 <p>GA4's interface is cluttered and confusing. Navigation is a labyrinth of menus and submenus that hide basic information. Reports load quickly but finding the right one is a chore. The design prioritizes Google's needs over users', making common tasks unnecessarily difficult.</p> | 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> |
| Customisability | 6 <p>Google Analytics offers decent customization through custom dimensions and metrics, but implementing these requires technical knowledge. Custom reports are possible but clunky to configure.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Drop in a tracking code and you're done. Setting up Google Analytics takes minutes, making it very simple to start with like most web analytics products. However, to make full use of the product there is a fair amount of customization that you can action after initial installation.</p> | 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> |
| Customer Support | 3 <p>Support is practically non-existent for free users. Google offers documentation but it's often outdated or unclear. Users mostly rely on community forums for help, creating a significant gap compared to privacy-focused alternatives that provide stronger documentation.</p> | 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> |
| Integratability | 8 <p>Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google's ecosystem (especially Google Ads) and offers connections to major marketing platforms. Its status as the industry standard means most tools support it, though privacy-focused competitors are quickly catching up.</p> | 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> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Data export options are adequate but outdated. Reports can be exported to spreadsheets or accessed via API, but the process feels clunky compared to modern alternatives.</p> | 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> |
