Fathom Lite

Author Paul Jarvis and developer Danny van Kooten created Fathom in 2018 to strip web analytics down to an independent counter that ran without corporate tracking networks. After the commercial project pivoted to a closed-source cloud service, this initial Go codebase was preserved as Fathom Lite for operators who insist on running their own telemetry. Deploying Fathom Lite today means accepting a frozen feature set in exchange for an unmetered, self-managed metrics collector.

Why Fathom Lite instead of Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 demands continuous integration overhead: implementing Tag Manager containers, maintaining consent management platforms, configuring custom event parameters, and linking advertising accounts. In contrast, Fathom Lite requires minimal integration effort. Teams embed a lightweight script tag pointing to their private host and allow two Content Security Policy directives. This eliminates third-party tag containers and prevents marketing pixels from slowing page loads or transmitting customer telemetry to ad brokers.

The operational tradeoff centers on what Fathom Lite omits. Google Analytics excels at multi-channel attribution, conversion funnels, ecommerce revenue reporting, and deep audience segmentation. Fathom Lite skips these capabilities entirely, providing neither an outbound webhook engine nor a public REST API for automated dashboard sync. Small teams and operations leads gain an uncluttered overview of daily pageviews and referrers, but anyone needing programmatic reporting must query the backend SQL database directly.

What it does well

• Packages the web server, database migrations, and Preact dashboard into a single compiled Go binary, allowing operations teams to deploy with a basic systemd unit or minimal Docker container.
• Serves an embedded tracking snippet under three kilobytes that requires only script-src and img-src headers in existing Content Security Policies.
• Supports pluggable database backends, running against local SQLite files for single-host setups or connecting to PostgreSQL and MySQL clusters.
• Displays core site performance—unique visits, total pageviews, average visit duration, referrers, and device types—on a single summary dashboard without nested menus.
• Supports multi-site tracking from a single installation, enabling small agencies to monitor dozens of client properties under distinct site keys.