- What is Google Analytics?
- Google Analytics is Google's web and app analytics product, now in its event-based GA4 version.
- What does it do?
- Tracks pageviews, events, conversions and traffic sources across sites and apps, then reports on them with audience segments and funnels. Connects to Google Ads and BigQuery for attribution and raw event export.
- Who is it for?
- Marketing and growth teams that want free, deep reporting and Google Ads attribution. Overkill for a small site whose owner only wants to know which pages get traffic.
- What are the alternatives to Google Analytics?
- Plausible, Fathom and Simple Analytics trade depth for cookie-free simplicity; Umami and GoatCounter can be self-hosted; Tinybird is for building analytics on raw event data.
Pricing
Free
GA4 is free; GA 360 is enterprise-priced
Free
About Google Analytics
Google Analytics 4 is free, complete, and built around Google's ad-product needs — which is what makes it the wrong default for most startups in 2026. The data model (events with parameters, no pageviews as a first-class concept) frustrates anyone who learned on Universal Analytics; the reporting UI is slow; and the data your visitors generate flows into Google's broader marketing graph whether or not you intend it to. The free tier is still unmatched on price, but the privacy-first crop (Plausible, Fathom, Pirsch) has caught up on the metrics that actually matter.
✓Best for
- Teams that run Google Ads and benefit from the conversion-tracking integration
- Anyone who needs the BigQuery export at scale (free up to 1M events/day)
- Sites where the analytics need is checkbox compliance, not active inspection
Top alternatives
Smaller, founder-led tools that quietly compete with Google Analytics.
Lightweight, privacy-friendly analytics.
Independent, open-source web analytics. EU hosted.
Simple, privacy-first analytics.
Bootstrapped, no cookies, no consent banners needed.
Open source counting analytics.
Tiny, ethical analytics maintained by one person.
Privacy-friendly analytics from Germany.
Cookie-free analytics built by a small EU team.
Privacy-first web analytics.
team based in the Netherlands, focused on simplicity.