What Fathom, Plausible, Umami and Matomo shipped in October 2026
Privacy-friendly web analytics is a crowded market, and the tools watch each other closely. Here is what the best-known ones changed in September and October 2026, with dates, taken from their own changelogs and release notes.
Fathom: five releases in one month
Fathom was the busiest by far. From its changelog:
| Date | What shipped |
|---|---|
| Oct 3 | An AI tab that shows visitors from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and other AI tools, using data you already have |
| Oct 5 | A separate share link per client or contractor, with optional password and expiry, revocable one at a time |
| Oct 7 | Luna, an AI assistant in the dashboard that answers questions about Fathom and about your stats, reading them only when you allow it |
| Oct 24 | Remove Unwanted Visits: filter down to test runs, staging traffic or bots, check what matches, remove them from every report, with undo |
| October | A free cookie checker that shows which cookies and trackers a site sets before consent |
Earlier, on July 15, Fathom also put more sites on bigger plans and added extra sites in packs of 50 for $10 a month.
Plausible: funnels and AI traffic
From the Plausible changelog:
- Sept 9: compare funnel performance across two time periods, and see total revenue and revenue per visitor at each funnel step.
- Sept 23: flexible funnels, where only the first and last steps are required and the steps in between are optional.
- Since late September (first archived Sept 20), a dedicated landing page on tracking AI referral traffic: human visits from AI assistants, not AI crawlers, tied to conversions and revenue.
Umami: MCP, then a security release
From Umami’s GitHub releases:
- v3.4.0, Sept 17: an MCP server so AI assistants can explore your analytics, chart annotations, API key management, a typed API client and session property segments.
- v3.4.1, Oct 23: mainly a security hotfix. It upgrades Next.js to fix a critical remote code execution issue, plus SSRF and cache poisoning issues, and pins a patched Node base image. The Umami team asks all self-hosted users to upgrade.
Matomo: “Ask Matomo” is coming in November
Matomo published help pages this week for Ask Matomo, an optional AI chat that answers questions about your reports in plain language, such as “what were my top campaigns last week?”. The page says it will be available in November 2026, for Matomo Cloud and On-Premise, and must be switched on by a superuser. Matomo also added a batch of A/B testing help pages in late October.
Simple Analytics: quiet
The Simple Analytics changelog has no entry since September 10, when it improved custom domains with automatic SSL certificates and DNS checks.
What it likely means
- AI referral traffic is now a standard feature. Fathom and Plausible both lead with it. A tool without an “AI sources” view will look behind in comparisons.
- “Ask your analytics” is next. Fathom has Luna, Umami has MCP, Matomo is launching Ask Matomo. Within a few months most tools in this group will let people ask an AI about their numbers.
- Agencies are a target. Per-client share links (Fathom) and bulk site packs point at agencies that manage many client sites.
- Self-hosting has a cost. Umami’s Next.js hotfix is a reminder that self-hosters have to keep up with security releases themselves.
What a competitor in this market could do
- Update your “vs Fathom” and “vs Plausible” pages to say whether you show AI referrals and whether you have an AI assistant or MCP server.
- If you sell to agencies, compare your client sharing with Fathom’s per-client links.
- Watch Matomo in November: the Ask Matomo launch post will show how they price it.
How this roundup was made
Every item above comes from the company’s own public changelog, release notes or help pages, with the date they give. We did not test the features ourselves. This is the kind of summary Competitor Radar sends every week for the competitors you choose. You can scan any site for free to see which pages it changed in the last 30 days.