fivebar vs Fathom

Fathom and fivebar both sell one plan with everything in it. fivebar’s everything includes how fast your pages load, which ones fail without any code, any AI app you use, and stats kept in the EU.

Both count without cookies, and count a visitor once a day. Both show you the bots they leave out, and both put visits from ChatGPT, Claude and the other assistants in a group of their own. Here’s where they part.

How fast your pages load

Fathom doesn’t time your pages: none of what it measures is a load time. Its own page comparing itself with Cloudflare Web Analytics names page load times as something Cloudflare has. fivebar’s tag times every page load in your visitors’ own browsers, and the Speed page rates each measure by Google’s thresholds, the Core Web Vitals among them, with the pages that load slowest listed first.

fivebar’s Speed page for djangodocs.dev: six tiles, TTFB, FCP, LCP, INP, CLS and PLT, each rated, then LCP for each day against Google’s thresholds — djangodocs.dev, whose stats are public, from 12 to 18 October 2026. One slow Sunday put its LCP past poor.

The AI is yours to choose

Fathom’s AI is Luna, a chat in its dashboard since October 2026, which reads your stats once you allow it and answers 30 messages a day. Fathom has no MCP server of its own.

fivebar’s AI is whichever app you already use. Add https://fiveb.ar/api/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor or any of the apps that take an MCP server, sign in and choose Allow. The app reads your stats with fivebar’s rules about what they mean, beside anything else it’s connected to, such as your code or your support inbox. Tick a box, and it adds goals and changes settings when you ask it to.

Pages that fail

For 404s, Fathom’s docs give you JavaScript to send each one as an event, which counts toward your allowance. Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so the Errors page fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from. Safari needs one attribute on your error pages’ template. Error pages are never billed.

fivebar’s Errors page for djangodocs.dev: 33 errors on 31 pages, a 15% error rate, each a 404, by day, status, source and device — djangodocs.dev answered 33 page loads with a 404 that week, nearly all of them on one Saturday.

Fathom has no team accounts: its docs say they’re being built. Instead, you share a site by a link, one for each person, who can look but not change anything. In fivebar, you invite people by email. Each signs in to their own account, as an editor, who can change goals and settings and invite others, or a viewer, with their own email reports and API tokens either way.

Where your stats are kept

Fathom removes EU visitors’ IP addresses on servers in the EU, then stores the analytics in the US, as it does everyone else’s. Nothing fivebar keeps is at rest outside the EU, or on a US company’s server, and your stats are on its servers in Germany, at Hetzner (Infrastructure).

Counting more

Properties. A fivebar event, or a page, can carry custom properties, and one of them on the tag is an A/B test. A Fathom event has a name, and a value for revenue.
Links out and downloads are counted by fivebar’s tag as they are. For Fathom, you paste in code that sends links out and downloads as events.
Scroll depth, beside time on page, in fivebar’s engagement. Fathom times visits and pages, and measures no scrolling.
Your own domain. fivebar’s script and its counts can go through your own domain. Fathom stopped offering custom domains in March 2023.

Prices

Both charge by the pageviews and events counted a month, with every feature on every plan, and a year for the price of ten months. Fathom’s plans hold 50 sites at first, more on bigger plans, 200 at 10M pageviews, and $10 a month for each 50 more, up to 750 more. fivebar’s hold 1,024. Every request to Fathom’s API counts as a pageview; fivebar bills none, nor an app’s questions, nor an error page.

Pageviews a month	fivebar	Fathom
10k	$5	$15
100k	$13	$15
1M	$50	$60
10M	$165	$200
50M	$650	On request

A month, in US dollars, from fivebar’s prices and Fathom’s, which quotes past 25M.

What Fathom has that fivebar doesn’t

An importer for Google Analytics 4, of pageviews. fivebar can’t bring your history over yet.
Revenue, as a value on each event, in its own currency.
Search Console: the searches that brought people from Google, beside the visits.
Data removals: take unwanted visits, such as your own tests, out of every report, and put them back later.
Milestones, notes on the chart for a launch or a change.

Switching

Add fivebar’s tag beside Fathom’s, and run both for a few weeks, so you have both counts for the same days before you take Fathom’s out. Where your pages call fathom.trackEvent(), call tally() with the same name. Your goals are added again in fivebar, in a site’s settings or by asking a connected app.

Checked on 19 October 2026, on Fathom’s own pages, each linked where it’s used.