Top 10 Google Analytics 4 Alternatives

Although Google Analytics remains the world leader among web analytics systems, some companies today are looking for alternatives or complementary services to it. Many are in search of the best alternative to Google Analytics, which can offer unique features and capabilities tailored to specific data tracking needs.

This is related to four trends in digital marketing analytics that significantly affect the quality of data and the preparation of marketing reports: Consent mode, restrictions on the use of cookies, ad blockers, and the transition to the new Google Analytics 4.

We’ve listed a few top alternatives to Google Analytics that will help you. Even if you do not entirely replace Google Analytics 4, you can at least supplement its capabilities and bypass its limitations.

Note: This post was originally published in September 2022 and was completely updated in October 2024 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Despite its widespread use, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) has several drawbacks, making it essential to consider the best Google Analytics alternative. For one, its complex terminology and filters can be confusing for beginners. Google even offers numerous online courses to help users understand the platform, but not everyone has the time or technical skills to invest in learning it.

Additionally, the latest version, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is significantly different from previous versions, requiring users to relearn the platform - only to face further changes in the future.

Other common issues include:

• Frequent updates: Google regularly modifies GA4, making menus, metrics, and features difficult to find, even for experienced users. Data can sometimes be deleted without warning.
• Skewed data: GA tracks data from internal users and bots, which can distort your metrics. For example, if your team frequently visits your website, it might appear as though your site traffic is higher than it actually is.
• Incomplete data: GDPR compliance means visitors can opt out of being tracked, leading to gaps in your data.
• Approximate metrics: Google Analytics 4 doesn’t track everything precisely, and some of the data it provides is estimated, which can be problematic for making key business decisions.

These limitations make it worth considering other analytics tools that may better suit your business needs.

Google Analytics alternatives often have steep learning curves, limited customization, and a lack of seamless integration with Google tools, affecting data synchronization and tracking accuracy.

Browsers and platforms are reducing the lifespan of third-party cookies, impacting key identifiers like Google Analytics Client ID. As a result, valuable data on the performance of advertising channels is becoming increasingly unavailable.

After the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect, Google Analytics 4 users in Europe faced a problem. GA4 has become illegal for website operators to use in several countries due to decisions by European data protection authorities, as it does not comply with the GDPR.

Now, businesses must remove Google Analytics from their websites or face fines for violating the GDPR. Users of Google Analytics operating in the European Union or serving customers in EU countries should take immediate action to ensure that no personal data is transferred to servers in the United States or find an alternative analytics platform that complies with the GDPR.

Additionally, integrating Google Search Console with other tools can aid compliance and performance monitoring.

In addition, to comply with GDPR requirements, websites must use Consent mode. A website must not identify users who do not want to share cookies. This leads to the following problem.

As a result, advertisers will continue to collect user activity data, but they won't be able to determine which interactions with ads lead to conversions. The average share of users who reject cookies on websites with Consent mode implemented is 30%. Depending on the type of website, this share can reach 40%.

More than 27% of users install apps to block ad content, and this share is growing every year. Most users who install ad-blocking apps will not reach your site, as your advertising messages will be blocked. However, about one-third of users who install ad blockers will still visit your site through organic or unblocked content. Such users and conversions are invisible for Google Analytics, however, since sending data to GA4 is prohibited.

We've compiled a list of the top 10 analytics services to help you solve the problems described above.

The right analytics tool is crucial for understanding user behavior and making data-driven decisions. Here are some important factors to consider when evaluating alternatives to Google Analytics.

A good Google Analytics alternative should be easy to set up and navigate, especially for non-technical users. Look for platforms with intuitive interfaces that simplify data collection and reporting without needing complex configurations. Quick implementation and minimal training requirements are key for seamless adoption.

Ensure the alternative offers flexible customization options for reporting and dashboards. You should be able to tailor the platform to suit your specific business goals, with the ability to track custom events for more detailed insights. Additionally, you can track custom metrics and dimensions. Flexibility in data segmentation and filtering is also crucial for deeper analysis.

Choose an alternative that integrates smoothly with your existing marketing and CRM tools, as well as platforms like Google Ads and BigQuery. This ensures seamless data flow across systems, enabling more comprehensive insights and better decision-making. Integration capabilities also reduce manual data handling.

With growing concerns over data privacy, it’s important to select a platform that is compliant with regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Simple analytics tools that are user-friendly and comply with privacy regulations can be a great alternative to traditional analytics tools. Look for transparent data collection methods, user consent features, and the ability to anonymize data. Compliance ensures that your analytics efforts are both legal and ethical.

Your chosen platform should be able to scale with your business as data needs grow. It should handle large datasets efficiently without slowing down. Consider alternatives that offer real-time analytics and can accommodate multiple users, ensuring performance remains optimal even with increasing data loads.

When considering alternatives to Google Analytics, it's important to understand the different types available, each offering unique features to address specific business goals. Below are some of the most popular categories of analytics tools.

These tools help track website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. Options like Fathom, Matomo, and Clicky are designed for businesses that want to understand how visitors engage with their websites and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Focused on product usage and user interaction, these tools, such as Mixpanel, Heap, and Woopra, provide detailed insights into user engagement. They are particularly beneficial for SaaS companies and product managers who need to track retention and usage patterns.

For those aiming to improve their search engine rankings, SEO analytics tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Serpstat offer insights into keyword performance and SEO strategies. Search engine optimization is crucial for analyzing and improving website rankings, and specialized SEO tools provide detailed metrics that general analytics platforms like Google Analytics may lack. These tools are essential for driving more organic traffic to websites.

Monitoring brand reputation and social media engagement is the focus of tools like Mention and Chartbeat. These analytics platforms help businesses track their brand presence and performance across various channels.

Comprehensive platforms like HubSpot, Optimizely, and Adobe Analytics provide an all-in-one solution for managing marketing campaigns and analyzing performance across multiple channels. These tools are ideal for businesses seeking a unified approach to their marketing and analytics efforts.

By understanding these categories, you can better assess which analytics tool aligns with your specific business objectives.

If you're looking for an alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), there are plenty of tools that offer unique features and better ease of use. Here are the top 10 Google Analytics alternatives to consider.

OWOX BI is a no-code digital analytics platform to collect, normalize, prepare, orchestrate, and analyze all your digital marketing data with ease. The best Google Analytics alternatives offer unique features and benefits tailored to different business needs, including privacy-friendly and all-in-one solutions.

With OWOX BI, you can collect first-party data, clean, map, normalize, and blend it with marketing data across all channels and devices, make it business-ready, and create cross-channel reports in minutes.

Many analysts are used to the Google Analytics data schema. Now that Google Analytics is banned in the EU, GA4 users must find a GDPR-compliant alternative and learn an unfamiliar data schema. With OWOX BI, however, you don’t have to learn a new schema. OWOX BI provides the familiar Google Analytics Universal data schema for hits and session transformation data.

In addition, OWOX BI automatically imports data from advertising accounts in a format that is convenient for analysts to work with:

• Recognizes UTM tags and dynamic parameters in ads so they can be merged with user actions on the site.
• Updates historical data to ensure that data in reports is as up-to-date as possible
• Converts ad costs into a single currency.
• Provides analysts with high data granularity to build any reports without restrictions.

With OWOX BI, you will be able to:

• Collect data in Google BigQuery with full GDPR compliance. OWOX BI provides secure first-party data collection on your domain and sends all your data directly to a location of your choice in the EU.
• Get your marketing analytics ready for a cookieless world. OWOX BI collects first-party data and merges it with marketing data in your warehouse. The service extends cookie expiration time up to 364 days and reduces the percentage of direct/no traffic, meaning you can use cookies for effective marketing for about a year.
• Be confident in the quality and completeness of data. With OWOX, errors, data silos, ad blockers, and cookie consent won’t be a problem anymore. OWOX BI collects each hit you previously sent to Google Analytics in your Google BigQuery EU storage in near real-time and without sampling.
• OWOX BI attributes cost data at the session level. You are no longer limited to evaluating marketing effectiveness within the scope of an advertising campaign and can correctly calculate unit economics. Evaluate the effectiveness of advertising for different cohorts, regions, landing pages, and product groups.
• Build any reports in a couple of clicks without coding and complex data transformations. With OWOX BI, you get up-to-date, unified data that is ready for further segmentation and reporting. There’s no need to prepare a data set for each report. Just decide what metrics you want to see in your report, and OWOX BI will automatically create them.

Piwik PRO Analytics Suite is an analytics platform focused on data privacy and security. It allows you to analyze user behavior on websites, in mobile applications, and on your local Intranet. Piwik PRO offers functionality similar to Google Analytics 4: event tracking, session metrics, custom dimensions, funnel analysis, custom reports, and multi-channel attribution. Even Piwik’s interface is reminiscent of good old Universal Analytics:

However, there are significant differences:

• The built-in Consent Manager allows you to comply with data privacy and security laws such as the GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.
• Full control over your data. Piwik PRO offers multiple storage options: five public cloud services, private cloud storage, or the user’s server.
• Native integration with the customer’s existing data platform allows you to collect and merge data from various sources: contact forms, web analytics, mobile applications, CRM systems, and transaction systems.
• A simple Google Analytics 4 (GA4) alternative can provide quick access to key metrics like visitor count and behavior through an intuitive dashboard, making it a user-friendly option compared to Google Analytics.

Comparison of Piwik PRO and different versions of Google Analytics 4:

HubSpot is a marketing solution that goes way beyond the basic data analytics that Google Analytics 4 offers. It includes CRM and CMS functionality, plus tools for marketing automation, data analysis, SEO optimization, sales management, email, etc.

A distinctive feature of HubSpot reports is the connection of marketing information with CRM data. By unifying lead data from the first touch to the sale and beyond, marketers can make better decisions that directly impact the business processes.

The analytical capabilities of HubSpot Marketing Analytics are more modest than those of Google Analytics 4. HubSpot provides information about page views, sessions, traffic sources, time spent on the page, exit/entry rates, and bounce rates.

Unlike Google Analytics 4, you will not find reports on the user funnel, devices (desktop and mobile), regions, and user demographics.

Woopra is a comprehensive customer journey analytics tool. It helps link all user interaction points to your website so you can increase engagement and retention.

Critical differences between Woopra and Google Analytics 4:

• Woopra focuses on identifying users by name or email. For example, if a user accesses a site from Chrome and later from Safari, Woopra will merge the two profiles so you can see the user's full history.
• Woopra offers one-click integration with other systems. CRM sales data is often associated with email addresses, so you can easily import it to enrich your Woopra profiles.
• Woopra allows you to use deep detailing in reports and does not limit their number. You can set up any funnels to see where users leave and how many conversions they bring.
• Woopra has real-time tracking that Google Analytics 4 doesn't have and updates instantly, unlike Google Analytics.

Matomo is a comprehensive web analytics platform that's an alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). The product sets itself apart from its main competitor due to its open source code, 100% data protection, and strict confidentiality.

Key features:

• Reveals conversion paths through visualization of entry/exit points, page-to-page transitions, and other actions on the site.
• Evaluates Google, Bing, and Yahoo keywords thanks to integrations with the relevant search consoles.
• Synchronizes with e-commerce platforms: WooCommerce, Magento, Prestashop, etc.
• Tracks the dynamics of various indicators: visits, bounces, actions on the site. It helps you understand how they change, taking into account geolocation, browsers, devices, and seasonality.
• Analyzes traffic sources and forms, monitors goals, and conducts A/B tests.

Heap is a digital insights platform that allows you to measure every user interaction with your site down to individual clicks and swipes.

In addition to standard tracking metrics such as page views, unique visitors, and bounce rate, Heap has other useful features including heat maps, custom dashboards, and advanced segmentation.

Heap's intuitive interface makes it easy to change the appearance of dashboards and add new widgets or reports as needed.

Heap works through a browser, so it does not require software installation and coding.

Fathom Analytics provides simple and useful website statistics focused on user privacy. It is a free GA4 alternative that provides basic site analytics.

Fathom collects trends and information, not personal data about specific website visitors. It only tracks these metrics:

• Number of unique site visitors
• Page views
• Average time on the site
• Bounce rate
• Best pages
• Best traffic sources
• Country, device type, and browser
• Goals configured by the user

GoSquared is a real-time web analytics service with an emphasis on the security of user data - that is, maximum compliance with the GDPR. The application is embedded on your website as a simple JavaScript snippet so as not to slow down page loading. All data is generated in real-time, and an application has been created for owners of e-commerce sites that takes into account website users' behavioral patterns.

Key features:

• Analysis of traffic sources, site interactions, and page traffic
• Notifications for traffic spikes and drops
• Details about users: language, geolocation, browser, provider, etc.
• Traffic forecast based on historical data; bounce rate calculation using proprietary formulas
• One-click data exporting; clear and reliable API

Clicky is a real-time web analytics tool that shows user visits and displays a click map on the site and visit duration.

Key features:

• All reports are in real-time
• Tracks the actions of each visitor
• Heat maps by pages, users, and segments
• Site health monitoring
• Excludes bot traffic and referral spam
• Handles split testing
• Ability to set goals, including dynamic and long-term

StatCounter offers a simple interface for basic real-time website analytics. It positions itself as a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) analog that's understandable for owners of small businesses that are not well-versed in digital marketing and analytics.

Key features:

• Ability to study users' paths on the site
• Analysis of all important indicators over time: visit duration, repeat visits, popular pages, percentage of visitors that bounce, etc.
• Statistics by geography, browser, operating system, etc.
• Separately, StatCounter offers to track paid traffic from Google, Facebook, and Twitter to detect click fraud

When choosing an alternative to Google Analytics 4, there are several factors to consider, ensuring you select the best tool for your business:

• Business Needs and Goals: Identify what you want to achieve with your analytics tool. Decide if you are seeking detailed user behavior insights, advanced analytics, or a simple, privacy-focused solution.
• Features and Benefits: Evaluate the features offered by each tool. Consider what metrics and reports are most important to you and how each tool can meet those needs.
• Ease of Use and Customization: Assess how user-friendly each tool is and the level of customization it offers. A tool that is easy to use and customize will save you time and help you get the most out of your analytics.
• Cost and Scalability: Consider the cost of each tool and whether it fits within your budget. Also, think about scalability—can the tool grow with your business and handle increasing data volumes?

By keeping these factors in mind, you can choose the right alternative to Google Analytics 4 that aligns with your business needs and helps you achieve your goals.

Google Analytics 4 is without a doubt a great web analytics tool, but it's not the only one. If it doesn't meet your needs, you can try one or more of the alternatives mentioned above.

When choosing an alternative, pay attention to the following:

• The type of data you want to collect
• Protection and security of your data and your users' data
• Available integrations
• Open source versus proprietary software
• How easy it is for non-technical users to use the tool

Choosing a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) alternative is not difficult if you keep in mind the features that are important to your success and the goals you hope to achieve.