Plausible vs Fathom vs Clycyo: Privacy Analytics Compared
Plausible, Fathom, and Clycyo all promise cookieless, GDPR-friendly analytics. Here is where they actually differ: events, revenue attribution, performance data, and price.
Plausible, Fathom, and Clycyo make the same opening promise: cookieless tracking, no consent banner, GDPR compliance by architecture rather than by paperwork. If that is all you need, you could pick any of the three and be fine. The real differences start after the pageview — in events, attribution, performance data, and how each product thinks about what analytics is for.
What all three get right
- No cookies, no persistent cross-site identifiers, no consent banner required for basic analytics.
- Lightweight scripts (1–2 KB region) that do not damage Core Web Vitals.
- EU-friendly data handling.
- Dashboards a non-analyst can read without training.
Philosophy: counting vs explaining
Plausible and Fathom are deliberate minimalists. Their products answer: how much traffic, from where, to which pages, and did goals fire. They defend that scope fiercely, and it shows in their calm UIs.
Clycyo starts from a different question: why did this visitor convert — or not? That requires joining more signals on the same record: the pages they saw, how fast each one loaded, what they clicked, whether a JavaScript error broke the flow, which UTM brought them in, and ultimately what revenue they generated. One timeline per visitor, from first anonymous pageview to paid invoice.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Plausible | Fathom | Clycyo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cookieless pageviews | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Custom events / goals | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| identify() after signup | No | No | Yes |
| Revenue events + first-touch attribution | Limited | Limited | Yes, webhook-friendly |
| Page-load time per visit | No | No | Yes |
| JS error capture | No | No | Yes |
| Web Vitals from real visitors | No | No | Yes |
| Public live demo dashboard | Yes | No | Yes — /open |
| Open source / self-host | Yes | No | No — managed cloud only |
Pricing shape
All three price on volume. Plausible and Fathom start around $14–15/month with trials; Clycyo starts free — 10,000 events/month, forever, no card — with paid tiers as volume grows (see pricing). For a small site, the practical difference is that Clycyo's free tier never expires, which makes the two-week parallel test genuinely free.
Choose Plausible if…
You want open source, the option to self-host, and a beautiful minimal dashboard for a content or marketing site. It is the category's reference design.
Choose Fathom if…
You want a polished, stable, zero-thought product from a small team with a long privacy track record, and your needs end at traffic + goals.
Choose Clycyo if…
You run a SaaS or product site and need the next layer: which channel produces paying users, whether slow pages are costing conversions, and what actually happened on a specific visitor's journey. That is the job Clycyo was built for — and you can audit the live dashboard at /open before signing up.
Deeper dives: Clycyo vs Plausible and Clycyo vs Fathom.