BYOViral vs Fathom Analytics

Two different ways of charging

Fathom sells one feature set at every price. What you pay depends on monthly pageviews, and custom events count toward that total. There is no free plan; the trial lasts seven days and needs a credit card. Every plan includes at least 50 sites, and you can add more in packs of 50 for $10 a month.

BYOViral prices the size of the visitor log instead of the traffic. Free, Premium and Ultra cost $0, $5 and $9 a month, keep the last 500, 10,000 or 100,000 visitors per site, and allow unlimited sites. Busy sites pay the same as quiet ones.

A site with 300,000 pageviews a month falls into Fathom's 500,000 tier at $45. On BYOViral the same site pays $0, $5 or $9, depending on how many recent visitors you want to keep in the log.

How a visit is handled

Fathom's EU isolation sends visitors from the EU to servers in Falkenstein and Nuremberg in Germany and in Helsinki, Finland. The IP address is removed there and, according to Fathom, never reaches its US systems; the anonymized result is then stored in the United States. Fathom builds a visitor ID with SHA-256 from the IP address, user agent, site ID and a daily salt, and sets no analytics cookies.

BYOViral sets no cookies either, and its script is about 650 bytes. Unlike Fathom, it keeps a visitor log by design: IP address, network, approximate location, browser, device, referrer and page for each recent visitor. You use it to see who is reading right now, to trace a traffic spike to its source, and to catch scrapers. The log is capped by plan and its oldest rows are deleted as new visitors arrive. Visits from hosting and cloud networks are labeled as likely bots and kept out of your totals.

If your legal team wants a provider that strips IP addresses before storage, Fathom is built for that and BYOViral is not. Neither tool's lack of cookies decides on its own whether your site needs a consent banner, because the rest of your page matters too.

Uptime monitoring: check the date on older comparisons

Many comparison articles still list uptime monitoring as a Fathom feature. Fathom removed it in October 2023, as its own changelog explains, so it is not part of the product today.

BYOViral includes uptime monitoring on Premium and Ultra. Each monitored site is checked every five minutes, response times and status codes are recorded, and you get an email alert when a site stops responding. If you are paying for a separate uptime service just to watch a few sites, that can make the $5 plan worth a look.

What Fathom does well

• Events and revenue tracking, with UTM reporting built in.
• Public or password-protected dashboards you can share with clients.
• Email reports, CSV export, an API and Google Search Console data.
• Import from Google Analytics 4, saved views and milestones.
• The EU isolation setup described above, which suits organizations with strict data-transfer rules.
• Fathom Lite, an older self-hosted version under the MIT license that still receives bug fixes but no new features.

Where BYOViral fits better

• You want to start without paying, or you track many small sites.
• You want to see recent visitors one by one, with their network and source.
• You want a public profile page and a badge that shows your monthly visitors to sponsors.
• You want free SEO tools and uptime checks in the same account.
• You want traffic spike and drop alerts (Premium) or visitor and IP labels with return alerts (Ultra).

Moving over

BYOViral cannot import Fathom history, and Fathom keeps your full history only while you subscribe, so download any reports you will need before you cancel. Running both scripts for a week or two is the simplest way to compare. The totals will differ a little, because each tool counts unique visitors with its own method and BYOViral leaves out traffic from hosting networks.