Alternatives to Google Analytics 4

What changes when you move off Google Analytics 4

People leave for three different reasons, and they do not point at the same row.

The first is the reporting model. Everything is recorded as an event, and questions that once had a report of their own are answered in explorations you build. Google states that the retention setting affects explorations and funnel reports, not standard aggregated reports, so plain totals reach further back than anything you break down. Standard properties choose 2 or 14 months of event data; 26, 38 and 50 months belong to Analytics 360.

The second is privacy and the place the data sits. Google documents where data is collected rather than where it is kept: EU, Swiss and UK traffic is collected through domains and servers in those regions, those IP addresses are not logged, and the traffic is then forwarded to Analytics servers for processing. The regional settings Google describes cover Google-signals and granular location data; a storage region is not among them. Where a consent banner is in place, behavioral modeling estimates the behaviour of visitors who declined analytics cookies.

The third is limits. Queries above the quota are sampled: 10 million events for a standard property, up to 1 billion for 360. Tables that pass their row limit push the rest into an (other) row, and any dimension with more than 500 values raises that risk. The BigQuery export, the usual way to raw events, is capped at 1 million events a day on a standard property.

What to check before you switch

1. Get the history out first. Google’s shutdown page says Universal Analytics data that was not exported has been deleted, and event data ages out at the retention setting. The export guide covers the routes.
2. What an importer keeps. Google’s reporting API hands over aggregates, so imported days carry pageviews, sources, countries and devices, not exit pages, scroll depth or event parameters.
3. The unit on the bill. The standard property is free and counts in events; the tools above bill by pageviews, events or hits, so the same traffic lands differently on each ladder.
4. The links you use in Admin. Google Ads, Search Console, BigQuery and Looker Studio belong to the property and do not travel with you.

Which of these can import your data

Several tools here connect a Google account with read-only access and pull the property through Google’s API, each with its own cut-off. Plausible imports day-level aggregates from your first Google visitor to your first Plausible visitor, without exit pages, scroll depth or UTM sources. Simple Analytics keeps only page_view events and stops at its own first pageview. Fathom Analytics writes daily figures without events and asks for non-overlapping dates. Swetrix brings pageviews and custom events with hourly precision; TinyAnalytics runs the import in an open browser tab and caps each one at five million events. Matomo takes aggregated reports only, so the visitor log and segments stay empty for imported days; its importer is free for the self-hosted edition and for Matomo for WordPress.

Heavier product analytics tools take another road: PostHog and Mixpanel document the BigQuery export rather than reading the property, which means a Google Cloud project and a link created in Admin. No route brings back Universal Analytics: Fathom’s importer page states that Google deleted that data on 1 July 2024.

Questions and answers

Can I keep my Google Analytics history?

Partly. The importers take daily aggregates rather than the raw events behind them, and each stops at the day your new tool started counting. For more detail, export from Google first and keep the files.

Will my numbers drop after the switch?

They change in both directions. Modeling fills in visitors who declined consent, so a property with a banner tends to report more than a fresh install elsewhere; several vendors state the opposite case, that their script is blocked less often than Google’s tag. Run both for a few weeks and compare trends.

Do I have to remove the Google tag to try something else?

No. Two scripts on the same page count separately, which is what an overlap period is for. Remove the Google tag once the new dashboard looks right.