head to head · open source
Fathom Lite vs Countly
Fathom Lite has 8,020 GitHub stars, 383 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Countly has 5,905 stars, 981 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Fathom Lite leads on adoption by 36% (8,020 vs 5,905 stars). Fathom Lite is written in Go under MIT; Countly is written in JavaScript under a custom or non-standard licence. Fathom Lite has attracted 5% as many forks as stars, Countly 17%. Countly was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (analytics), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Fathom Lite | Countly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 8.0K | ★ 5.9K |
| License | MIT | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-03-18 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 383 | ⑂ 981 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Fathom Lite if
- You weight community size — 8.0K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Countly if
- You want the Countly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and Countly fits your workflow better
About Fathom Lite
Fathom Lite is the original open source, self hosted edition of Fathom Analytics — a simple, privacy focused website analytics tool written in Go with a Preact dashboard, released under the MIT licence for people who want to run their own analytics server rather than buy a hosted service.
read the full Fathom Lite overview →
About Countly
Countly is a privacy first, AI ready analytics and customer engagement platform that organizations deploy themselves rather than consume only as a hosted service. The server side component lives in this repository and is written in JavaScript, sitting in the JavaScript and Node.js ecosystem alongside the client SDKs that ship separately for iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, NodeJS, Unity, Java and JavaScript. The platform is built around the idea that customer data should stay under the operator's control: Countly runs on premises or in a private cloud, and the project describes full data ownership, deployment…
read the full Countly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Fathom Lite or Countly more popular?
Fathom Lite has 8,020 GitHub stars and Countly has 5,905. Fathom Lite has the larger community by that measure.
Are Fathom Lite and Countly free?
Both are open source. Fathom Lite is licensed under MIT, and Countly has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Fathom Lite and Countly?
Fathom Lite is written in Go and Countly in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Fathom Lite or Countly?
Choose Fathom Lite if you want the larger community (8,020 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose Countly if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.