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.

What it is

Fathom Lite is a previous and open-source version of Fathom Analytics, the paid, hosted Google Analytics alternative. It was the very first version of that software and has been downloaded millions of times. The application is built with Golang and Preact, carries the MIT licence, and lives in the Data & Analytics / Web & Product Analytics category. The repository shows 8,020 stars, 382 forks, and just 5 open issues, and it is tagged with topics including analytics, website-analytics, metrics, privacy, and google-analytics.

The concrete problem it solves is replacing Google Analytics with self-hosted website metrics that keep visitor data on infrastructure you control. Instead of paying a hosted provider, an operator runs the Go binary or a Docker container, registers a user account, and serves an analytics dashboard on port 8080. The project is explicitly no longer adding features: it is maintained long-term for bug fixes only, so the Lite edition stands as a stable, frozen implementation of the original Fathom idea.

Key capabilities

• Single Go binary that serves the analytics dashboard: ./fathom server starts the webserver, reachable at http://localhost:8080.
• User registration from the command line: ./fathom user add --email= --password=.
• Build pipeline driven by make build, which compiles the project into an executable and requires Go and NPM installed.
• Docker packaging with docker build -t fathom . to build an image and docker run -d -p 8080:8080 fathom to run the container, plus a pre-built Docker image.
• Custom configuration values documented in docs/Configuration.md.
• Production installation instructions maintained in docs/Installation instructions.md.
• Privacy-focused website analytics with a self-hosted dashboard, distributed under the MIT licence.

Who uses it and how

• Teams that want website metrics without sending visitor data to a third party deploy it on their own server and run the Go binary directly.
• Developers spin up a local development instance by cloning the repository into $GOPATH/src/github.com/usefathom/fathom, running make build, adding a user, and visiting port 8080.
• Operators who prefer containers deploy the pre-built or self-built Docker image and expose port 8080.
• A typical installation serves a single site, since the Lite requirements describe one install rather than many sites per account.
• Installations are community-supported and used as-is, without an email support SLA.

Getting started

Follow docs/Installation instructions.md for a production install, or run the pre-built Docker image with docker run -d -p 8080:8080 fathom after building it with docker build -t fathom .. For a development instance, run make build, then ./fathom user add --email= --password=, then ./fathom server.

How it compares

The paid products this project relates to are Fathom Analytics (hosted) and, by extension, the Google Analytics alternative it replaces. Fathom Lite is free and MIT-licensed but entirely self-hosted: you run the servers and updates, and scaling and backups are your responsibility, while the hosted product is fully managed and priced per monthly pageview. The hosted service is cookie-free and therefore needs no analytics banner, whereas Fathom Lite uses cookies, and the hosted product adds API access, custom events, ecommerce tracking, UTM campaigns, EU isolation, custom domains, GA import, email reports, CSV export, and up to 50 sites per account — none of which the Lite edition provides.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose Fathom Lite if you want a small, MIT-licensed, self-hosted analytics server and are willing to run the Go or Docker deployment yourself, including updates, scaling, and backups. Avoid it if you need cookie-free tracking, API access, custom events, ecommerce reporting, multiple sites per install, a modern dashboard, or vendor support, because all of those are hosted-only features. Note also that active feature development has stopped: the maintainers fix bugs but add nothing new, and the older Lite UI is frozen as-is.

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