Credit where it is due: Fathom Analytics is one of the most respected privacy-first tools around. It is fully cookieless, beautifully simple, and its EU isolation routing is genuinely clever. If we are going to win you over, it will not be by pretending otherwise. It will be because of what happens after the visitor count: paths, funnels, page speed and SEO - and where, exactly, your data sleeps at night.
Deliberate simplicity - great on day one, limiting once you start asking "why".
Fathom tracks events well - button clicks, form submits, even revenue. But you cannot see how a visitor flowed from step one to completion, or the road one person took from a blog post to your signup page. When conversions drop, that road is where the answer lives.
Fathom says nothing about how fast your pages felt to real visitors. LCP, INP and CLS affect both conversion and Google ranking, and measuring them needs a tracker that collects them. Fathom's does not.
No Search Console integration, no keyword rankings, no backlinks, no domain health. Fathom shows you the traffic; understanding where your organic traffic comes from - and where it could come from - means paying for a second tool.
Fathom is a Canadian company. EU visitor traffic is routed through EU servers and IP addresses are stripped before anything crosses the Atlantic - smart engineering, honestly. But the anonymized data is then stored on US infrastructure. Corbacount keeps everything in Germany, full stop.
Fathom starts at $15/month for 100k pageviews and steps up tier by tier as traffic grows. Generous in one way - up to 50 sites are included on every plan. But a viral post raises your bill. Corbacount's Solo plan is a flat €4/month, whatever your traffic does.
No cookies at all is a real privacy achievement, and Fathom deserves the credit. The structural trade-off: without any identifier, a visitor returning next week looks brand new, and a multi-visit journey cannot be reconstructed. Some questions simply cannot be answered cookieless.
The same privacy-first conviction - no ad network, no data sales - with the depth and the EU address built in.
Follow the path a visitor took through your site, page by page - stored first-party in Germany, shown only to you, never shared or sold.
Track a "/thanks" URL or set one JavaScript variable, then watch step-by-step funnels and trace every conversion back to its source and exact path.
LCP, INP and CLS from your real visitors on every page, in the same dashboard as your traffic. No Lighthouse guesswork.
Search Console queries plus keyword rankings, backlinks and domain health - next to the visits they produce, not in a second subscription.
A live view of everyone on your site right now and the page they are reading, with visitors expiring two minutes after their last pageview.
Solo €4/month for 1 site, Studio €15 for 5, Agency €50 for 25 (excl. VAT). Pay yearly and get two months free. No pageview tiers, ever. See pricing.
| Fathom | Corbacount | |
|---|---|---|
| Company & data location | Canadian company; EU traffic processed in the EU, anonymized data stored in the US | All data hosted in Germany (EU), nothing leaves |
| Cookies | None at all (fully cookieless) | One first-party _cc_vid cookie - see do you need a banner? |
| Tracker script | Approximately 2 KB (smaller than ours) | 2.2 KB gzipped (7.3 KB raw), async, never blocks the page |
| Sites included | Up to 50 on every plan | 1 / 5 / 25 depending on plan |
| Individual visitor paths | No | Yes, first-party and private |
| Funnels | No (events only, no step flows) | Yes, with per-step drop-off |
| Realtime view | Yes - live visitor count | Live per-visitor view with current page (2-min presence) |
| Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS) | No | Built-in, from real visitors |
| SEO data | No | GSC + rankings, backlinks, domain health |
| Ask your own AI questions (MCP) | No | Yes, via the MCP server |
| Price for one site | From $15/month per 100k pageviews | €4/month, flat (excl. VAT) |
| Free trial | 7 days | 14 days |
Last checked: June 2026. Fathom details and pricing as published on usefathom.com - check there for their current offer. We aim to keep this fair; tell us if something is outdated.
No. Fathom is a genuinely privacy-first company with a polished product, and if a clean cookieless visitor count is all you need, it does that very well. This page exists for the moment you want more than the count - journeys, funnels, page speed, SEO - and for anyone whose compliance team wants every byte stored inside the EU.
Honest answer: the cookie is the feature. One first-party _cc_vid cookie on your own domain is what makes returning-visitor counts accurate and visitor paths possible - things no cookieless tool can fully reconstruct. It is never shared across sites, never sold, and stored only in the EU. Whether it triggers a consent banner depends on your situation - we wrote up the details on our cookie banner page.
For many sites, probably yes - stripping IP addresses inside the EU before anything reaches US servers is solid engineering, and we will not scaremonger about it. The difference is simpler than that: with Corbacount there is no routing scheme to evaluate, because everything lives in Germany. One sentence in your privacy policy instead of a paragraph.
That is exactly what we suggest. The tracker is one async snippet - run both for a couple of weeks, compare the numbers, keep the one that answers your questions. Comparing other tools too? See Corbacount vs Plausible, Corbacount vs Umami or the full comparison.
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