Fathom Lite

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 795 words

Do not start a new Fathom Lite install in 2026. The binary still runs, the dashboard is still one of the cleanest "pageviews and referrers" screens ever shipped, and it still fits in 128 MB of RAM, but the open-source edition stopped receiving development years ago while the company behind it built its paid, closed, hosted product. The only good reason to run it today is that you already do and it has not broken. If you are choosing fresh, the same idea now lives in Plausible, Umami and GoatCounter, all maintained.

What Fathom Lite got right, and who inherited it

The idea was radical in 2018 and is standard now: a single Go binary, SQLite by default, a tracker script of about 2 KB, no cookies, no consent banner, and a dashboard with exactly six numbers per site: page views, unique visitors, average time on page, bounce rate, top pages and top referrers. Nothing else. That restraint is why it earned 8,000 GitHub stars and why the three successors all cite it.

GoatCounter is the spiritual successor and the one I point people at when they say "I just want Fathom Lite but maintained". Umami is what to pick when you run more than a couple of sites and want a nicer screen. Plausible is the best product of the three and the only one that needs a real server.

Unmaintained matters more for analytics than for most apps

The tracker script is public JavaScript served on every page of your site, which makes it exposed surface that will never receive a security fix. The Go binary is statically linked, so the TLS and HTTP libraries compiled into it are frozen at whatever versions the last release used. Bot filtering is the practical casualty: the list of crawlers it recognises has not moved in years, and the AI crawler traffic of the last two years is counted as human visitors, so its numbers drift upward in a way you cannot correct. None of that is a reason to panic if it is running behind a reverse proxy on a hobby site. All of it is a reason not to build anything new on it.

If you run it anyway, this is the whole configuration

Fathom Lite reads a .env file next to the binary:

FATHOM_SERVER_ADDR=:8080
FATHOM_DATABASE_DRIVER=sqlite3
FATHOM_DATABASE_NAME=fathom.db
FATHOM_SECRET=a-long-random-string

Create a login with fathom --config=.env user add [email protected] --password=..., start it with fathom --config=.env server, and put Caddy or another reverse proxy with TLS in front of port 8080. Register a site in the dashboard and paste the tracker.js snippet it gives you. The usefathom/fathom Docker image wraps the same binary if you prefer Compose. Backups are one file: stop the process or use SQLite's .backup command and copy fathom.db somewhere else. That really is the complete operational surface, which is the thing people miss about it.

Your history will not come with you

Fathom Lite stores aggregated daily statistics, not raw events, and none of the three replacements has an importer for its format. Plausible imports from Google Analytics exports, GoatCounter can ingest web server logs, and Umami has no importer aimed at Fathom at all. Treat the switch as a clean start: dump the old database with sqlite3 fathom.db .dump into an archive for the record, run the old and new trackers side by side for 2 weeks so you can see how the counts compare, then remove the old snippet. Expect the new tool to report fewer visitors, and treat that as the bot filtering finally working rather than lost traffic. The wider process of moving off tracking-heavy analytics is in the ditching Google Analytics piece.

What I'd do

GoatCounter if what you loved about Fathom Lite was the single binary and the SQLite file, since it is the same shape with a maintainer. Umami if you have several sites and want the better dashboard on a 512 MB container. Plausible if you have 2 GB to spare and want the most finished product. If Fathom Lite is already running for you, leave it alone until something breaks, keep it behind a reverse proxy, and schedule the migration for a quiet weekend rather than an emergency one.