Fathom Analytics vs Heap in 2026: Cookieless traffic reporting vs autocapture product analytics
Fathom answers "how much traffic did I get and where from" without a consent banner. Heap answers "what did users actually do inside my product" by recording every click from day one.
Fathom Analytics
Heap- Fathom collects no cookies and no personal data, so no GDPR, CCPA, or PECR consent banner is required. Heap uses cookie-based tracking and requires standard consent handling.
- Heap autocaptures every interaction from the moment the script is installed and lets you define events retroactively. Fathom has no autocapture or retroactive event capability; it tracks page views and manually defined conversion events.
- Fathom publishes transparent pricing starting at $15/month for all features on every plan. Heap has a free tier at 10,000 sessions/month, but Growth, Pro, and Premier all require contacting sales.
- Fathom retains data forever on every plan. Heap's free tier keeps 6 months of history and Growth keeps 12 months, with longer retention reserved for Pro and Premier.
- Heap includes funnels, retention charts, journey mapping, and Heap Illuminate, an automated data science layer that surfaces the behaviors most correlated with conversion. Fathom has none of this; it is not a product analytics tool.
- Fathom includes at least 50 sites on every plan, making it practical for agencies managing many client properties on one predictable bill. Heap is priced per account, not per site, and is not built for agency-style multi-client management.
- Session replay and heatmaps are available on Heap only as paid add-ons on Pro and Premier. Fathom does not offer session replay or heatmaps at all.
Fathom Analytics and Heap solve different problems and rarely compete for the same buyer. Fathom is a privacy-first web analytics tool: one script tag, no cookies, no consent banner, forever data retention, starting at $15 per month with no free tier. Heap is a product analytics platform built around autocapture, meaning it records every click, form submission, and interaction automatically so you can define new events retroactively instead of waiting on developer instrumentation. Heap has a free tier capped at 10,000 monthly sessions, but every paid tier above that requires a sales conversation. The real decision is not which tool is "better," it is whether you need simple, transparent traffic reporting or deep in-product behavioral analysis.
The tools at a glance
Fathom Analytics
Simple, GDPR-compliant web analytics with cookieless tracking, forever data retention, and no consent banners
Fathom Analytics is a privacy-first web analytics platform used on over a million websites. It collects no cookies and no personal data, which means the entire consent-banner conversation disappears: there is nothing to ask permission for. Setup is a single script tag, and the dashboard covers visitor counts, top pages, referrers, countries, devices, and conversion events without requiring any configuration beyond the initial install.
The pricing model is refreshingly plain compared to most of this category. Every plan includes the full feature set, API access, ecommerce tracking, and at least 50 sites, with additional site packs available for $10/month. There is no tiered feature-gating and no sales call required to see a number. The trade-off is that Fathom starts at $15/month with no permanent free tier, only a 7-day trial, so you are committing to a paid relationship earlier than with a freemium tool.
What Fathom does not do is just as important as what it does. There is no product analytics, no funnel-by-user-behavior analysis, no session replay, and no heatmaps. It answers "where is my traffic coming from and what pages are working" cleanly, but it is not built to answer "why did this specific user abandon checkout on step three."
| Feature | All plans From $15/mo |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Based on monthly page views |
| Sites included | 50+ |
| Data retention | Forever |
| API access | ✓ |
| Product analytics / funnels | ✗ |
| Session replay | ✗ |
| Free tier | 7-day trial only |
Heap
Autocapture product analytics that records every user interaction automatically
Heap is a product analytics platform used by over 10,000 companies, built around autocapture: one script records every click, pageview, and form interaction the moment it is installed, with no event taxonomy to plan upfront. Because the raw interaction history already exists, you can define new "virtual events" retroactively and get answers about behavior from before you knew what you wanted to measure. That is a fundamentally different workflow from tools like Fathom, which only report on what you explicitly track going forward.
Beyond autocapture, Heap includes funnel analysis, retention charts, journey mapping, and Heap Illuminate, an automated layer that surfaces which user behaviors are most correlated with conversion or churn without an analyst building the hypothesis first. Since the 2023 Contentsquare acquisition (which also brought in Hotjar), Heap users get access to Sense, a natural-language AI assistant for querying behavioral data, plus session replay and heatmaps as add-ons on the higher tiers.
The free tier caps at 10,000 monthly sessions and 6 months of history, which is workable for evaluation but thin for a live production app. Every paid tier, Growth through Premier, requires a sales conversation rather than a self-serve checkout, so pricing is opaque until you engage. Heap is also not designed around multi-site agency management the way Fathom is; it is priced and structured around a single product's full behavioral dataset.
| Feature | Free $0 | Growth Contact sales | Pro Contact sales | Premier Contact sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly sessions (free tier) | Up to 10,000 | |||
| Data history (free tier) | 6 months | |||
| Autocapture / retroactive events | ✓ | |||
| Funnels, journeys, retention | ✓ | |||
| Session replay / heatmaps | Add-on, Pro and Premier | |||
| Data warehouse sync | Add-on on Pro, included on Premier |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Fathom Analytics | Heap |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking method | Cookieless, no personal data | Cookie-based autocapture |
| Consent banner required | No | Yes |
| Product analytics (funnels, retention, cohorts) | No | Yes |
| Autocapture / retroactive events | No | Yes |
| Session replay | No | Add-on (Pro/Premier) |
| Heatmaps | No | Add-on (Pro/Premier) |
| API access | Yes (all plans) | Yes |
| Data warehouse / BI connector | No | Yes (Heap Connect, add-on/Premier) |
| White-label delivery | No | No |
| Free tier | No (7-day trial only) | Yes (10K sessions/mo) |
| Data retention | Forever | 6-12 months depending on plan |
| Multi-site / agency management | Yes (50+ sites per plan) | No (single-product pricing model) |
| Starting price | $15/mo | Free / Contact sales for paid |
Which should you choose?
Fathom AnalyticsHeapHeapFathom AnalyticsHeapFathom AnalyticsThese tools rarely show up in the same shortlist because they answer different questions. Fathom is for teams who want to know how their site is performing without engineering a data pipeline or worrying about privacy law. Heap is for teams who need to reconstruct what users actually did inside a product, including behavior no one thought to track at the time. Buying Heap to replace Fathom, or Fathom to replace Heap, means solving the wrong problem for your team.
Bottom line
Pick Fathom Analytics if you run one or many websites and want simple, forever-retained traffic reporting without a consent banner or a sales call. Pick Heap if you are building a product and need to understand user behavior deeply enough to retroactively answer questions you did not know to ask six months ago, and you are willing to talk to sales once you outgrow the free tier.
Frequently asked questions
Can Fathom Analytics replace Heap for product analytics?
No. Fathom tracks page views, referrers, and manually defined conversion events, but it has no funnel analysis, retention charts, or autocapture. If you need to understand step-by-step user behavior inside your product, Heap is built for that and Fathom is not.
Does Heap require a cookie consent banner?
Yes, Heap uses cookie-based tracking, so standard GDPR, CCPA, and PECR consent requirements apply. Fathom Analytics is the cookieless alternative in this comparison and requires no consent banner at all.
Is Heap's free tier enough for a production app?
It is workable for evaluation but thin for production. The free tier caps at 10,000 monthly sessions and 6 months of data history, and any expansion beyond that requires moving to Growth, which is priced through a sales conversation rather than published rates.
Why does Fathom not have a free tier like Heap?
Fathom is a bootstrapped, independently owned company with a single pricing philosophy: every plan gets the full feature set at a transparent monthly rate starting at $15, with only a 7-day trial to evaluate before committing. Heap uses a freemium model instead, with a capped free tier as the entry point.
Which tool is better for an agency managing multiple client sites?
Fathom Analytics. Every plan includes 50-plus sites with additional packs available for $10/month, which makes multi-client billing predictable. Heap is priced and structured around a single product's behavioral dataset, not around managing many separate client sites.
Does Heap include session replay like Hotjar?
Session replay and heatmaps exist on Heap only as paid add-ons on the Pro and Premier tiers, both of which are sales-gated. Fathom does not offer session replay or heatmaps in any form.