Google Analytics 4 vs Statable

What the numbers say

One of these is free and one starts at nine dollars a month, so the comparison is not about price. It is about what each one loads into the page, where the data goes and what you have to ask visitors before counting them.

The weight is the first number that separates them. Google Analytics 4 ships about 146 kilobytes of compressed JavaScript; Statable ships a little over two. That is roughly sixty-five times the payload for a measurement both tools perform, and on a slow connection it is the difference between a counter you never notice and one that shows up in a performance report.

The second number is retention. GA4’s history is configurable, with the standard property defaulting to a short window for event-level data; Statable’s pricing page states that data is kept permanently. If a year-on-year comparison matters to you, that single row decides more than any feature list.

The third is the legal shape. GA4 sets cookies unless you run it in a consent-driven mode, stores data in the United States and expects a consent banner. Statable sets no cookies, stores data in the Netherlands and its vendor states that a banner is not required — while also stating that the identifier it builds is pseudonymous and remains personal data under the GDPR. Neither position is legal advice, and both depend on your setup: what your other scripts load, and what you put into event names and page addresses.

What GA4 has and the smaller tool does not is depth of the surrounding platform: audiences shared with Google Ads, the BigQuery export, attribution models, an app and web property in one place. If advertising on Google is the centre of your measurement, that connection is the argument, and no privacy-first counter replaces it.

What Statable has instead is the whole feature set on the first paid step — funnels, custom events, an unlimited number of websites, a public dashboard you can share by link, and an import that reads your existing GA4 history so the switch does not start an empty chart.

Who picks which

Google Analytics 4 stays where the money is spent on Google advertising, where a team already reads its reports, or where the BigQuery export feeds something downstream.

Statable fits a site that wants the traffic questions answered — how many people, from where, which pages, which campaigns, which actions — without a consent banner, without a heavy script and without data leaving the EU. It is a narrower tool on purpose: no audience sharing with an ad platform, no BigQuery, no app property.

Questions and answers

Can I keep my Google Analytics history?

Yes, up to a point. Statable documents an import from Google Analytics 4 that pulls aggregated daily history through Google’s authorisation flow, so the charts start with your past traffic rather than empty. Aggregates are not event-level data: if you need the raw rows, export them from GA4 before you stop collecting there.

Do I still need a consent banner if I switch?

That depends on the rules where you and your visitors are, on everything else your pages load, and on how you configure the tool. Dropping analytics cookies removes one common reason for a banner; it does not remove the others — consent rules in the EU are not limited to cookies, and other scripts on the page may need one anyway. The vendor’s own position is recorded on its card as a vendor position, not as our verdict.

Will the numbers match after the switch?

No, and nothing makes them match. Ad blockers stop a Google script far more often than a small first-party one, the two tools count sessions and events differently, and GA4 applies its own modelling to thresholded data. Expect a step in the chart on the day you switch and read the trend after it, not across it. The guide to server-side and client-side tracking explains why two counters on one site disagree.