Google Analytics 4 vs Plausible Analytics

Google Analytics 4

The captured pages document cross-device and cross-platform audience analysis, country and city data derived from IP addresses, shareable reports, and in the paid tier unsampled total-data reports with intra-day data within an hour, plus an advertising workspace with cross-channel ROI and attribution reports. We found no public information on the standard reports themselves — top pages, referrers, campaign parameters, a real-time view, date comparisons or scheduled email reports — on the pages captured.

Plausible Analytics

The dashboard covers visitors, pageviews, entry and exit pages, referrers and channels, UTM campaigns with automatic channel grouping, countries, devices and browsers, plus a real-time view refreshing every 30 seconds; saved personal and site segments, annotations, a consolidated multi-site dashboard, weekly and monthly email reports and password-protectable shared links are documented. Google Search Console data appears beside the traffic, and traffic spike and drop notifications work against a user-set limit. We found no public information stating reports are unsampled, or on custom dashboards and report builders inside the product itself.

Google Analytics 4

Conversions are documented as key events with Google Ads conversion tracking and remarketing, conversion and behavioural modelling to fill gaps where consent is denied, attribution models to evaluate in the advertising workspace, customer-lifecycle analysis and machine-learning predictions in the paid tier. We found no public information on funnels with drop-off, form submissions, scroll depth or e-commerce tracking, which is the very reporting our forms office would need.

Plausible Analytics

Goals can be pageviews or custom events with properties, and outbound links, file downloads, form submissions, 404 pages and scroll depth are measured without code — the form and funnel reporting is exactly what we need for finding where residents abandon applications. Funnels run two to eight steps in three modes with per-step drop-off, date comparison and revenue at the steps, and revenue goals work with named shop systems such as WooCommerce and Shopify, with user journeys for exploring paths. We found no public information on cohort and retention analysis, comparison of attribution models, or conversions passed back to ad platforms.

Google Analytics 4

The consent workflow is documented in detail: with consent denied, Analytics cookies are not written and cookieless pings are sent, EU visitors' IP addresses are deleted before recording and never logged, and Google Signals and detailed location and device data can be switched off per region. But the default state grants consent and writes advertising cookies, the recommended set-up loads tags before a consent dialog, and more than thirty consent management platforms are listed as partners; we found no public information on a mode that runs without a consent banner, on a stated position on §25 TDDDG, or on data protection authority rulings. For a council that will not show a cookie banner, the captured pages leave that central question open.

Plausible Analytics

No cookies, no persistent identifiers and no cross-site or cross-device tracking; visitors are counted with a daily hash of salt, website domain, IP address and user agent, the salt is deleted every 24 hours, and raw IP addresses and user agents are never stored — so the council would show no cookie banner. The consent-free position is stated against named law (GDPR, PECR, CCPA) and backed by an independent legal assessment by a data protection lawyer on a legitimate-interest basis, with the open-source code auditable. We found no public information naming the German provision on device access or a data protection authority's recognition of the consent-free mode, nor supplied wording for our privacy policy.

Google Analytics 4

The paid tier documents a daily BigQuery export covered by an SLA and unsampled total-data reports, and the data processing terms commit to deleting all customer personal data within a maximum of 180 days after the contract ends. We found no public information on a reporting API, CSV export of reports or a self-hosted edition, which is what our requirement to keep residents' data on the municipal data centre's own servers would rest on.

Plausible Analytics

The customer retains full ownership of the website data, with a documented read-only stats API, CSV exports of every dashboard report, a site-level export that can be re-imported into another Plausible instance, historical import from Google Analytics 4, and scheduled daily raw event exports to S3-compatible storage on the Enterprise plan. The Community Edition is AGPL-licensed with an installation guide and can run on our own municipal servers in any country, though it omits funnels, user journeys, revenue goals and single sign-on, and dashboard exports and the stats API require an active subscription. Data is deleted with an export window after a subscription lapses.

Google Analytics 4

Installation runs through gtag.js, Google Tag Manager with community templates for the listed consent platforms, and a Firebase SDK for apps, with the required tracking domains published for content security policy configuration. We found no public information on script size, plugins or guides for named CMS systems, single sign-on, team roles or a public status page.

Plausible Analytics

A snippet goes into the page head, stated at 135KB less JavaScript per visitor than Google Analytics, with an official WordPress plugin handling installation, WooCommerce revenue and automatic form tracking, guides for many named platforms, automatic single-page-app support, Android, Flutter and Swift SDKs, a Google Tag Manager template, a first-party script proxy and a server-side events API. Team roles, single sign-on on Enterprise, an installation testing tool and a status page with 99.99% uptime over 90 days are documented. We found no public information on published SLA terms or white-labelling for agencies.

Google Analytics 4

Google Ireland Limited in Dublin is the named provider with a published register number, a data processing agreement, ISO 27001 certification and a subprocessor list, and EU visitors' measurement data is collected through EU domains and servers with IP addresses deleted there. However, the terms allow processing of customer data in any country where Google or its subprocessors maintain facilities, the privacy policy describes servers worldwide, and the parent company sits in the USA with US Cloud Act exposure; we found no public information on a self-hosted edition or on any commitment to store our residents' data in Germany or the EU.

Plausible Analytics

The contracting entity is Plausible Insights OÜ in Tartu, Estonia with registry and VAT numbers; visitor data sits on Hetzner servers in Falkenstein, Germany with UpCloud in Finland for databases, all stated to stay in the EU on EU-owned infrastructure, and a data processing agreement is published and applies automatically — something our procurement office can sign without negotiation. Subprocessors for the visitor-data chain are listed with European locations, though payment and support services such as Paddle and Help Scout appear without theirs, and we found no public information on ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification. The self-hosted edition keeps every record on the customer's own servers if we run it in the municipal data centre.

Google Analytics 4

The product family comprises a free Google Analytics 4 and a paid Analytics 360 positioned for large enterprises with enterprise-level support and SLAs. We found no public information on any price for the paid tier, on traffic bands, included sites and users, or on minimum term and setup conditions, so the procurement office cannot compute an annual cost from the captured pages.

Plausible Analytics

Starter is published at €9/month for up to 10k monthly pageviews, Growth at €14, Business at €19 with yearly billing giving 2 months free, and the site, team member and feature allocation per tier is unusually explicit — funnels and the stats API on Business, single sign-on and scheduled raw exports on Enterprise — while the self-hosted edition carries no fees to the vendor. However, what happens when traffic exceeds a tier, overage pricing and the Enterprise price are not publicly stated, and we found no public information on minimum contract terms or VAT treatment. For a 400,000-resident site I cannot yet compute our annual cost from the public pages alone.