Google Analytics 4 vs Plausible Analytics

Google Analytics 4

The advertising workspace with cross-channel ROI and attribution reports, shareable reports, and device and location data covers the campaign view I live in, and the premium tier even states unsampled total-data reports and intra-day freshness within an hour. We found no public information on entry and exit pages, referrer lists, a real-time view, or scheduled email reports, so I cannot confirm the full reporting stack.

Plausible Analytics

Pages, entry and exit pages, sources, referrers, UTM tags and channels with automatic grouping for Paid Search and Affiliates, countries through to cities, devices and browsers, a real-time view refreshing every 30 seconds, saved personal and site segments with combinable filters, annotations, a consolidated dashboard across my sites, weekly or monthly email reports and Search Console data beside the traffic. That covers nearly everything I need to judge my Google and price-comparison spend. We found no public information on custom dashboards or report builders, or on ad-platform cost data shown beside the traffic.

Google Analytics 4

Google Ads conversion tracking and remarketing with key events, plus conversion and behavioral modeling that fills gaps when consent is denied, is exactly the loop back into Ads that my budget needs — but only into Google platforms, not Meta or the price comparison sites. We found no public information on checkout funnels with drop-off per step, e-commerce tracking of orders and revenue, or plugins for named shop systems like Shopware.

Plausible Analytics

Pageview goals without code changes, custom events with properties, automatic tracking of outbound links, file downloads, form submissions, 404s and scroll depth, plus funnels of 2–8 steps in sequential, flexible or strict modes with per-step drop-off — even counting a Stripe checkout detour as the same session — and revenue goals with total revenue, average order value, multi-currency support and attribution by campaign, landing page, country and device, including a WooCommerce revenue plugin and a Shopify guide. For my checkout funnel this is close to what I run reports for. We found no public information on cohorts and retention, on comparing several attribution models, or on conversions being sent back to Google Ads or Meta server to server — and the Google Analytics import comes in only as day-level aggregates, so historical order data arrives flattened.

Google Analytics 4

Consent mode is documented in real depth — cookieless pings when consent is denied, region-specific defaults, best practices for the banner, and 33 named CMP partners — and GA4 states IP addresses are never stored or logged. But the default state assumes everything granted, with advertising cookies read and written and advertising IDs collected, the modeling cannot estimate anything for TCF-based denials, and we found no public statement of the consent position against German or French law or a privacy-policy wording.

Plausible Analytics

No cookies, no persistent identifiers, no cross-site or cross-device tracking, and visitors counted through a published daily hash of salt, website domain, IP address and User-Agent, with the salt rotated and deleted every 24 hours and raw IPs and User-Agents never stored. The no-banner position is stated against named law (GDPR, PECR, CCPA) and backed by an independent legal assessment of consent-free analytics on the basis of legitimate interest, with data pseudonymised on arrival and anonymised within 24 hours. We found no public information on ready-made wording for my privacy policy or per-data-type retention settings — but this is the reason I would sign: my numbers stop depending on a click on accept.

Google Analytics 4

A daily BigQuery export covered by an SLA and deletion of all customer data within a stated maximum of 180 days after the term are the two things that let me take the data with me. We found no public information on a reporting API, CSV export of reports, or a self-hosted edition, and the captured pages state a fee is possible for data deletion.

Plausible Analytics

The customer retains full ownership of the website data, a Stats API covers reporting while an Events API covers collection, dashboard reports export as CSV (top 300 entries per report, top 100 for pages), a site-settings export is reimportable into another Plausible site, Google Analytics 4 history can be imported, and Enterprise plans deliver daily raw event data to my own S3-compatible storage. The Community Edition is AGPL-licensed and runs on my own server, though its documented feature set omits funnels, user journeys, e-commerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API, so parity is partial. Deletion after subscription lapse is documented, with an export window before the dashboards are removed.

Google Analytics 4

Consent mode can be enabled with minimal coding via Google Tag Manager community templates or gtag.js commands, apps use the Firebase SDK, and the documented script domains tell me what to allow in a content security policy — a workable install path. We found no public information on plugins or guides for Shopware and other shop systems, the script size, team roles and permissions, or a public status page.

Plausible Analytics

A snippet goes into the head, the script is documented as 54 times smaller than Google Analytics with 135KB less JavaScript per visitor, and official routes exist for WordPress including WooCommerce revenue tracking, Shopify, a Google Tag Manager template, NPM, single-page-app frameworks and mobile SDKs such as Android, Flutter and Swift. Server-side tracking via the events API, a first-party script proxy to get past ad blockers, view-only and full-access team roles, single sign-on on Enterprise, an installation testing tool and a public status page showing 99.99% uptime over 90 days make this a solid operational package. We found no public information on a Shopware or TYPO3 plugin, so for my Shopware shop it is the manual snippet.

Google Analytics 4

The contracting entity is Google Ireland Limited in Dublin and EU traffic is collected through EU domains and servers with EU IP addresses deleted before recording, plus a published data processing agreement and ISO 27001. But the processing terms allow processing in any country where Google or its subprocessors maintain facilities, servers run worldwide, the parent company sits in California, and the subprocessor locations are not shown on the captured pages — no EU-bound storage is promised.

Plausible Analytics

Plausible Insights OÜ, incorporated in Estonia with registration number and VAT ID published, is the contracting entity; visitor data is processed and stored in the EU only on EU-owned infrastructure — Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany, Bunny in Slovenia for CDN, UpCloud in Finland for databases — and the subprocessor list with locations is public alongside a data processing agreement in force automatically for all customers. An AGPL self-hosted edition documented to run on my own server keeps every visitor record in my own chain. Independent confirmation of entity, ownership and residency beyond the vendor's own pages was not available, and we found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certifications, so I stop one step short of the top marks.

Google Analytics 4

The pages distinguish a free product from the premium Analytics 360 aimed at large enterprises with SLAs and the BigQuery export, so a free tier exists. We found no public information on what Analytics 360 costs, how price scales with traffic, sites or features, or minimum term and VAT treatment — I could not compute an annual cost from these pages.

Plausible Analytics

Starter at €9 /month up to 10k monthly pageviews with one site, Growth at €14 /month with three sites and three team members, Business at €19 /month with ten sites, funnels, e-commerce revenue attribution and the Stats API, Enterprise as contact us, yearly billing with 2 months free, a 30-day trial without credit card, and a free self-hosted Community Edition with community support only. The feature-to-plan mapping is public (funnels and the Stats API on Business, raw event exports and SSO on Enterprise). We found no public information on what happens when traffic exceeds a tier, on VAT treatment or a minimum term, and Enterprise is a sales conversation — so I cannot compute my real annual cost at my traffic level from these pages alone.