Fathom is a well-run, privacy-first analytics product and their claims hold up. From their own features page:
No, Fathom does not use cookies. So you don't need an ugly consent/cookie banner for analytics when you use Fathom.
and on European data:
We automagically process all EU visitor data through our EU-located infrastructure, ensuring zero personal data ever leaves the EU.
That last one is a genuinely thoughtful piece of engineering: they route by visitor location rather than making you pick a region. We are simply EU-hosted throughout, which reaches the same place by a simpler road.
Fathom has no session replay
It is not on their features page and it is not a thing you can turn on. Same category of decision Plausible made, and defensible for the same reasons.
The consequence is the same too. The day you need to know why people abandon step three, Fathom cannot tell you, and you go shopping for a recorder. That recorder will almost certainly use cookies, which puts back the banner you chose Fathom to avoid.
Galytics includes session replay in the same script, with every form field masked in the browser before anything is transmitted.
The rest is close
Both are cookieless, both are hosted rather than self-hosted, both are paid, both are small teams who answer their own support. If replay were not on the table this would be a coin toss decided by dashboard taste, and we would tell you to try both.
Side by side
| Galytics | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|
| Cookies | None | None |
| Consent banner in the EU | Not needed | Not needed |
| Data location | EU | EU for EU visitors, routed automatically |
| Session replay | Included | Not offered |
| Heatmaps | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Uptime and speed focus | Yes | Yes, via their global CDN |
When Fathom is the better call
If your traffic is largely outside the EU and you want it processed close to where it originates, their routing is neater than our single-region approach. If you like their dashboard better, that is a perfectly good reason too, and you should trust it.
Galytics is the better call when you want the sessions as well as the numbers. See what that includes.
Sources
- Fathom Analytics features, for the cookie, EU processing and feature statements
Checked August 2026. If any of this has changed, tell us and we will correct the page.
Website analytics and session replay in one cookieless script.
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