Abner vs Fathom Analytics

Overview

If you are comparing privacy-first analytics tools, Abner and Fathom Analytics both deserve a spot on your shortlist. They share a core commitment to respecting visitor privacy, avoiding cookies, and keeping things simple. Fathom has been around since 2018, has a well-earned reputation, and a loyal community of users who appreciate its clean approach to web analytics.

Where the two tools diverge is in scope. Fathom is a focused web analytics product — page views, referrers, top pages, and event tracking. It does that job well and does not try to be more than what it is. Abner covers the same web analytics ground, but extends into territory that matters specifically to SaaS teams: built-in SaaS metrics like MRR, churn, and LTV through a native Stripe integration, plus Core Web Vitals monitoring and Google Search Console data — all in one dashboard.

This post walks through the similarities and differences honestly so you can decide which tool fits your needs. Both are good products built by people who care about privacy. The right choice depends on what you are building and what data you need.

Shared Values

Before getting into the differences, it is worth highlighting how much Abner and Fathom have in common. These are not minor points — they represent a shared philosophy about how analytics should work.

• No cookies. Neither tool sets cookies, which means no consent banners cluttering your site and no incomplete data from visitors who decline tracking.
• GDPR and CCPA compliant. Both tools are designed from the ground up to comply with privacy regulations without requiring extra configuration or legal review on your part.
• Lightweight scripts. Both prioritize minimal performance impact. Your page load times will not suffer from either tool.
• Clean, simple dashboards. No labyrinth of nested menus or reports. Both tools show you the metrics that matter on a single, easy-to-read screen.
• Transparent data practices. Neither tool collects personal data, harvests information for advertising, or sells visitor data to third parties.

Fathom is a genuinely well-built product with a strong track record. If you are reading this comparison, you are already making a good decision by looking at privacy-respecting alternatives. The question is which feature set matches your situation.

SaaS Metrics: The Biggest Difference

This is where Abner and Fathom differ most significantly. Fathom is a web analytics tool and a very good one. But if you are running a SaaS business, knowing your page views and referrers is only half the story. You also need to track your revenue metrics: monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn rate, customer lifetime value (LTV), average revenue per user (ARPU), trial-to-paid conversion rate, and how those numbers change over time.

Fathom does not offer revenue or subscription metrics. To get that data, you would need to add a separate tool like Baremetrics, ChartMogul, or ProfitWell alongside Fathom. That means another subscription to manage, another dashboard to check, and no straightforward way to correlate your traffic data with your revenue outcomes.

Abner includes native Stripe integration for SaaS metrics right alongside your web analytics. Connect your Stripe account with read-only access and Abner automatically computes MRR, churn, LTV, ARPU, trial-to-paid conversion, new subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. Everything lives in the same dashboard where you are already looking at your traffic.

For SaaS founders and teams, this is the most compelling reason to choose Abner. When you can see that a traffic spike from a particular referrer also led to a bump in trial starts and eventually paid conversions, you are making better decisions with less effort. No context-switching between tools, no mental stitching of data from separate systems.

Core Web Vitals Monitoring

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, which means monitoring them is important for anyone who cares about SEO. Abner includes built-in real-user monitoring for five key performance metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — measures how quickly the main content of a page loads.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — measures visual stability and how much the layout shifts as elements load.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — measures responsiveness when a user interacts with the page.
• FCP (First Contentful Paint) — measures the time until the first visual content appears.
• TTFB (Time to First Byte) — measures how quickly your server begins responding.

These metrics are collected from actual visitor sessions and displayed directly in your Abner dashboard, broken down by page. You can identify performance bottlenecks based on real-world data rather than synthetic lab tests.

Fathom does not currently offer Core Web Vitals monitoring. If performance data matters to your workflow — and for SEO it should — this is an area where Abner provides more out of the box without needing a separate tool like SpeedCurve or manual Lighthouse audits.

Google Search Console Integration

Understanding how your site performs in organic search is critical for growth. Abner integrates Google Search Console data directly into the dashboard, pulling in your top search queries, click-through rates, impressions, and average positions alongside your traffic and revenue metrics. This gives you a unified view of organic search performance and its business impact without needing to switch to a separate Google tool.

Fathom does not currently integrate Google Search Console data. If you want to see your search performance, you would need to check it separately in Google's own Search Console interface. For teams that rely on organic search as a growth channel, having this data consolidated in one place saves time and makes it easier to connect the dots between search visibility and downstream results.

Custom Domains and Ad Blocker Bypass

One area where Fathom has a clear advantage today is custom domains. Fathom allows you to serve the analytics script from your own domain, which helps bypass ad blockers that target third-party analytics scripts. This can meaningfully improve data accuracy, especially for audiences that are more likely to use ad blockers — such as developers and technical users.

Abner does not offer custom domain support yet, though it is on the roadmap. For now, if maximizing data collection accuracy against ad blockers is a top priority, this is a point in Fathom's favor. It is worth noting that because both tools are privacy-first and do not track users for advertising, they are blocked less frequently than tools like Google Analytics, but custom domains provide an additional layer of resilience.

Script Size and Performance Impact

Both Abner and Fathom take script size seriously, and both deliver analytics with minimal impact on your site's performance.

Fathom's tracking script weighs approximately 2KB (gzipped), which is impressively compact. Abner's core script comes in at under 2KB, with the Web Vitals measurement module lazy-loaded separately so it does not block initial page rendering or affect your Largest Contentful Paint score.

In practice, the difference between these two is negligible. Both scripts load quickly, use minimal bandwidth, and will not drag down your Lighthouse scores. Abner's slightly different architecture — lazy-loading the Web Vitals code — means you get additional performance data collection without paying a performance cost upfront.

EU Data Isolation

Fathom offers an EU isolation feature that routes and processes all visitor data exclusively through EU-based infrastructure. For teams with strict data residency requirements or those operating in industries where data must not leave the EU, this is a valuable capability. Fathom has been transparent about its infrastructure and has invested in making EU isolation a first-class feature.

Abner stores and processes data in a privacy-compliant manner and does not collect personal data as defined by GDPR. Because no personal data is collected — no cookies, no IP addresses stored in raw form, no persistent identifiers — the compliance posture is strong regardless of where the data is processed. However, if your specific requirement is that data processing infrastructure must be physically located within the EU, Fathom's explicit EU isolation feature is a differentiator to consider.

Pricing

Fathom starts at $15 per month for 100,000 pageviews. The pricing scales from there based on pageview volume. It is straightforward and fair for a web analytics tool. However, if you are running a SaaS business, remember that Fathom covers only the web analytics side. You would still need a separate revenue metrics tool, which adds significant cost — Baremetrics starts at $108/month and ChartMogul starts at $100/month for paid plans.

Abner starts at $19 per month for 1,000,000 pageviews — that is ten times the pageview allowance at a comparable price point. And the plan includes everything: web analytics, SaaS metrics via Stripe integration, Core Web Vitals monitoring, Google Search Console integration, CSV data export, and API access. No add-ons, no separate subscriptions for different features.

For a SaaS team that needs both traffic analytics and revenue metrics, choosing Abner means replacing two or three separate tools with one. The total cost of ownership is substantially lower, and you get far more pageviews included in the base plan. Even for teams that do not need SaaS metrics, Abner's pageview-per-dollar ratio is hard to beat.

Feature Comparison

When to Choose Fathom

Fathom is an excellent choice if you are running a content site, a blog, a marketing site, or any project where you need clean, privacy-first web analytics and nothing more. It has been around longer, has a proven track record, and offers features like custom domains and EU data isolation that matter to certain use cases.

If you do not have a SaaS product with recurring revenue to track, do not need Web Vitals monitoring, and want the reassurance of EU-isolated data processing, Fathom is a strong option. It does web analytics well, it respects privacy, and it has earned the trust of its user base over several years.

When to Choose Abner

Abner is the better fit if you are building or running a SaaS product and you want a single tool that covers both your web analytics and your revenue metrics. Instead of paying for Fathom plus Baremetrics or a similar revenue tool, Abner gives you everything in one dashboard for less than what the combination would cost.

Choose Abner if any of these apply to you:

• You are a SaaS founder or team that processes payments through Stripe.
• You want to see MRR, churn, LTV, and ARPU alongside your traffic data in one place.
• You care about Core Web Vitals and want real-user performance monitoring built in.
• You want Google Search Console data integrated into the same dashboard as your analytics.
• You want to reduce the number of tools and subscriptions you manage.
• You are scaling and need generous pageview limits without steep price increases.

Abner was built specifically for SaaS teams who were tired of juggling three or four separate tools to get a complete picture of their business. If that describes your situation, it is worth trying.

The Bottom Line

Both Abner and Fathom are privacy-first analytics tools built by people who believe analytics does not have to come at the cost of visitor privacy. You will not go wrong with either one for basic web analytics. They share the same foundational values, and both are far better choices than surveillance-based alternatives.

The decision comes down to what you need beyond web analytics. If you are running a SaaS business and you want traffic analytics, revenue metrics, Core Web Vitals, and Search Console data in a single dashboard, Abner is built for you. If you need a focused, well-established web analytics tool for a content site or blog and value features like custom domains and EU data isolation, Fathom is a solid choice.

Either way, you are choosing privacy over surveillance — and that is a decision you will not regret.