Comparison
Fathom built its reputation on two things: radical simplicity and a no-nonsense approach to privacy. One dashboard, one price tier, no feature gating. For a lot of small teams and indie founders, that clarity is exactly what they need. We respect what Fathom has built.
Where Fathom stops, Palace starts. If knowing your traffic sources and pageview counts is enough, Fathom is a clean choice. If you want to understand what visitors actually do on your site — the paths they take, the steps they skip, how engaged they really are — you'll need more than Fathom offers.
Fathom starts at $15/month for 100,000 pageviews — a 30-day trial, then billing begins. Palace starts free, permanently, with the same 100,000 event volume. Same scale, zero cost to start.
Both tools take a single-tier approach to features — everything is included regardless of which plan you're on, and neither locks features behind upgrades. That's a philosophy we share with Fathom and think is the right way to do it.
The meaningful pricing difference is teams. Fathom has no team or multi-seat functionality at all — it's a single-user tool. Palace supports unlimited team members and seats on every plan, which matters the moment you need to share access with a colleague, client, or co-founder.
Fathom gives you a clean read on the standard metrics: where visitors came from, which pages they visited, how long they stayed, and what events they triggered. It does this reliably and without clutter. If that's your whole use case, it's hard to fault.
Palace covers all of that and then asks the next set of questions. Where did visitors go after they hit your homepage? Which step in your onboarding flow is losing people? Which articles are driving signups versus just traffic? User journey mapping, funnel tracking, and an engagement score answer these — and none of them exist in Fathom.
Palace also ships a full UTM dashboard so you can build, manage, and track campaign links in one place, and a built-in link shortener for clean tracking URLs. Fathom reads UTM parameters passively but offers no tooling around them.
Both tools are cookieless, GDPR-compliant, EU-hosted, and require no consent banner. Privacy is a non-issue when choosing between them — both clear the bar cleanly.
One small difference: Fathom stores anonymized IP hashes as part of its deduplication approach. Palace collects no personal data whatsoever by default. In practice neither is a compliance problem, but if your privacy posture is maximally strict, Palace goes slightly further.
Choose Fathom if you want the most stripped-back analytics experience possible — one screen, one number, no decisions. It's a single-user tool built for people who want to check their stats and move on.
Choose Palace if you need teams, deeper behavioral analytics, or a campaign management workflow. You get Fathom's simplicity on the surface and significantly more power underneath — starting free, with no feature limits regardless of plan size.
Set up takes minutes. Your first 100k events are free.
Simple, usage-based pricing from $0.00