Compare·Google Analytics

Everyone already has it.

GA4 is free and everyone knows it, which are two real advantages. But getting an answer out of it takes work, and its numbers become estimates once your traffic grows.

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What Google Analytics is

Google’s analytics product, rebuilt around an event model in GA4 and wired into the rest of Google’s advertising stack.

Licence: Proprietary
Hosting: Google-hosted only
Best at: Costing nothing at any volume, and joining up with Google Ads and Search Console in ways nobody outside Google can match.

Where Google Analytics wins.

If one of these is a must-have for you, go with them.

It is free at any size

There is no event limit and no bill. If budget decides it and you can live with the trade-offs below, that is hard to beat.

It is wired into Google

Its links to Ads audiences, conversion imports and Search Console are first-party and deep. If you buy a lot of Google traffic, that loop is worth real money.

Everyone has already learned it

Every agency, contractor and new hire has seen GA. Whatever you switch to, somebody has to learn something.

Where Spreelytics wins.

Every line here is a page in the product today.

Never sampled

Every query reads every row for the range you picked. There is no sampling threshold to cross and no "estimated" badge appearing on a number the week your campaign works.

The answer is on the page

Funnels, retention, journeys and person-level timelines are pages you open. In GA you build each one as an exploration.

Revenue with attribution attached

Payments from Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy are traced to the channels that earned them. Use last-touch, or linear to see the assists, over a lookback window you set. You can read our rule. GA’s data-driven model cannot be inspected.

It is not an ad product

Your events stay in your workspace. They are not a signal source for an advertising network, which is most of why GA is free.

Side by side.

We leave prices out because Google Analytics can change theirs at any time. Ours are on the pricing page.

Spreelytics compared with Google Analytics, feature by feature
Feature	Spreelytics	Google Analytics
Free tier	100k events / month, 13 months of data	Unlimited events
Data sampling	Never sampled	Sampled above thresholds
Cookies	One first-party cookie, or cookieless	First-party, consent mode in the EU
Open source	Not included	Not included
Self-hosting	Not included	Not included
Funnels	Included	Build an exploration
Retention and cohorts	Included	Build an exploration
Path analysis / journeys	Included	Build an exploration
Person-level timelines	Included	User explorer, in Explore
Revenue attribution you control	Last-touch or linear	Data-driven or last click
AI crawler and bot traffic	Included	Not included
MCP access for AI agents	Included	Official, read-only
Session replay	On Growth	Not included
Feature flags and experiments	Not included	Not included

Moving over.

Every one of these starts by leaving Google Analytics running.

Add the snippet alongside GA

Both can run at once. Nothing is switched off while you are still checking the numbers agree.

Let a fortnight collect

Enough for the insight baseline to mean something and for you to compare a full week against a full week.

Name your goals

Pick the pages and events that count as a win, and connect your payment provider so they carry the money. That is the part GA4 makes you configure twice.

Drop the GA tag when you trust it

Or keep it for the Ads loop. Plenty of people run both on purpose, and that is a reasonable end state.

FAQ

Switching from Google Analytics.

What people ask before they switch.

Will my numbers match GA exactly?

No, and no two analytics tools ever do. The usual causes are sampling on their side, different bot filtering, and different session-timeout rules. Ours are unsampled and datacenter traffic is dropped at ingest, so our visitor counts are typically lower and steadier than GA’s.

Is this GDPR-safer than GA?

Your events stay in your workspace and are never sold, shared or used for ad targeting. By default we still set one first-party cookie. There is also a cookieless mode you can switch on per project, and it stores nothing in the browser at all. Whether either needs a banner depends on your jurisdiction and what else you collect, so ask whoever handles privacy at your company. We will tell them exactly what is stored.

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