mcp-analytics vs Fathom Analytics (2026)

Feature	mcp-analytics	Fathom Analytics
Price entry	Free 100k hits/mo, no card. €19/mo for 10M hits.	30-day trial, no free tier. $15/mo for 100k pageviews.
Hits at $15-$19	10,000,000 / month	100,000 / month
Dashboard UI	None. MCP-only.	Polished, single-page, designed for sharing.
MCP server	Yes, primary interface. 23 tools, OAuth 2.1.	No.
Unlimited sites	Yes, all tiers.	Yes, all tiers.
EU isolated hosting	Hetzner Falkenstein (Germany), always.	EU-isolated option available; default is shared US/EU.
Cookieless	Yes in strict mode.	Yes by default.
Custom events	JS + server-side SDK (Pro).	JS only on Cloud.
AI / bot taxonomy	8 traffic classes including ai_user_action and ai_crawler buckets.	Bots filtered silently.
Data retention	1 year (Free) / 3 years (Pro) / custom (Enterprise).	Forever on paid plans.
Public dashboards	No (private only).	Yes, one-click public sharing.

Fathom is the premium-aesthetics player in the privacy-first analytics space. Their dashboard is genuinely beautiful, their brand is strong, they’ve been operating since 2018 with a single-page design that holds up.

mcp-analytics is a different bet. Both privacy-first, both EU-hosted, both subscription products. The difference is interface. Honest case for each:

Where Fathom wins

The dashboard. Fathom’s single-pane design is arguably the best-looking analytics dashboard ever shipped. If you want to glance at your stats in 5 seconds and have it feel pleasant, Fathom wins. We don’t have a dashboard at all. That’s the whole point of the product, but it means we won’t ever beat Fathom on this axis.

Mature product. Fathom has been live since 2018, has thousands of paying customers, has been through every privacy regulation shift in the US and EU. We’re newer.

Public dashboards. Fathom lets you share a public, read-only version of your dashboard with one click. We don’t have an equivalent (no dashboard to share). If transparency matters (a public benchmarking project, an open-source repo with stats), Fathom is the right tool.

Forever-retention on paid plans. Fathom keeps your data forever on any paid tier. We retain 1 year on Free, 3 years on Pro, custom on Enterprise. If long-term retention matters, Fathom is more generous.

EU-isolated hosting (opt-in). Fathom offers an EU-isolated hosting option. Their default is shared US/EU infrastructure. Worth knowing if compliance is a serious requirement.

Where we win

The free tier. Fathom has no free tier. 30-day trial, then $15/month minimum. We have 100,000 hits/month free forever, unlimited sites, all features. The difference between “tried once” and “still using it two years later” comes down to that gate.

100x more volume at the same price point. $15-19/month gets you 100,000 pageviews at Fathom and 10,000,000 hits at us. If you have a popular newsletter, blog, or anything that occasionally spikes, that 100x headroom means you don’t sweat overage.

MCP-native primary interface. The actual reason we exist. Web analytics that lives entirely inside your Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor workflow. You ask in plain English, the LLM picks the right tool, you get an answer back. No dashboard to learn, no UI to maintain, no tab-switching.

You: "Compare last 7 days vs the prior 7 days for the launch landing page."
Claude: "Pageviews 12,840 (up 47%), but bounce rate jumped from 38% to
        61%. Top new referrer is hacker news, likely a single thread
        driving a lot of low-intent visits. Your conversion event
        'signup_started' is flat at 287 vs 281."

Fathom has an API, but no chat interface. Their dashboard requires you to open a tab and click through.

AI crawler visibility. We classify traffic into eight buckets including ai_user_action (Claude or ChatGPT fetching a page on a user’s behalf), ai_crawler (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.), and verified_search_bot (Googlebot et al). Fathom filters bots silently. You can’t see your GPTBot share.

Server-side events from your backend. Our ingest endpoint accepts POST /event directly. You can track webhook deliveries, server-side conversions, cron jobs. Things the JS tracker never sees. First-party Ruby gem and npm wrappers are on the Pro roadmap. Fathom is JS-tracker-only on Cloud (their self-hosted Lite version is different).

When you should pick Fathom

You care about the dashboard aesthetic and the public-sharing feature.
You have stable, low-volume traffic (well under 100k/month).
You want a mature, well-known product with thousands of customers de-risking your choice.
Long-term retention is non-negotiable.

When you should pick us

You spend hours per day in Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor and want analytics inside that workflow.
You want a real free tier you can live in without a card.
Your traffic might spike. You need 100x more headroom at the same price.
You want explicit AI-crawler tracking, not silent filtering.
You need server-side events from your backend (webhooks, cron, server-side conversions).

What’s not a real difference

Both EU-hosted (us always; Fathom on the EU-isolated tier).
Both cookieless by default in strict mode.
Both unlimited sites on all tiers.
Both target the privacy-first market.

Hosting and cookie posture are tablestakes in 2026.

Migration

You can run both in parallel. Fathom and our tracking script don’t conflict. Add ours alongside, ask the same questions in both for a month, then decide.

Many users keep Fathom on their primary marketing site (for the dashboard) and add us on side projects and internal tools (for the chat workflow). No rule says one has to win.

Try it

Sign up free, 100k hits/month, no card. Add your domain alongside your existing Fathom snippet if you want a side-by-side.

Specific Fathom feature you’re worried about losing? Email us. We’ll tell you straight up whether we cover it.