After buiding regex.help I was curious about how much traffic it gets. fly provides some basic metrics, but that wasn’t enough to really know how many people find the site helpful.

For a while now I’ve been hearing about both Plausible Analytics and Fathom. They share a bunch of similarities and the ones most important for me are:

• they’re both provacy-first, aiming to give you useful information without tracking your visitors personally,
• there are no cookies, so no need to add any banners,
• they’re fairly simple UI-wise, exposing just the high-level info.

Features

It wasn’t initially clear to me what the differences were - after a buch of reading, turns out there aren’t that many! They’re both very easy to set up, Plausible has a lower/cheaper pricing tier and a couple more features, which are just now in the preview version of Fathom (v3) - but otherwise they seem to be very comparable.

• Fathom
  • $14/month, 100k monthly pageviews,
  • unlimited websites,
  • uptime monitoring.
• Plausible
  • €6/month, 10k monthly pageviews, or €12/month, 100k monthly pageviews,
  • 20 websites,
  • built with Elixir <3.
• Both
  • no cookies,
  • email reports,
  • serve JS from own domain,
  • privacy-focused,
  • Google Search Console integration (Fathom v3),
  • track campaigns with UTM (Fathom v3),
  • filtering (Fathom v3),

Suddenly, Adblockers

One annoyance is that they are both blocked by uBlock Origin, even after setting up a DNS CNAME record to serve the script from own domain.

This is bittersweet - on the one hand I love uBlock origin and have been using it for years, so I’m glad it’s doing a good job blocking trackers. On the other - this makes these solutions much less useful for me. I want to build things for technical people and they’re likely to have something like uBlock running. The alternative is probably server-side analytics? I guess I’ll need to investigate that next.