Google Analytics 4 vs Simple Analytics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedGoogle Analytics 4 compared with Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics positions itself as a cookieless layer that sits alongside GA4 rather than replacing it, arguing it recovers the 20 to 60 percent of traffic lost to consent denial and ad blockers. That framing is honest about the fact that most businesses will not delete GA4. Run GA4 for Google Ads, run Simple Analytics for the numbers you trust.
Simple Analytics compared with Google Analytics 4
GA4 is free at any volume and uniquely able to push conversions and audiences into Google Ads; Simple Analytics is €20, needs no consent banner, and sees the traffic GA4's banner and blocklists hide. Simple Analytics explicitly positions itself to run alongside GA4 rather than replace it, which is the correct answer for anyone spending money on Google Ads and the wrong one for anyone who is not.
Choose Google Analytics 4 if
Any business that runs Google Ads and needs conversion import, audience remarketing, and data-driven attribution inside Google's own ecosystem, plus larger sites that want a free raw event export into BigQuery and have someone able to write the SQL.
Choose Simple Analytics if
European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Google Analytics 4 | Simple Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Analytics | Analytics |
| Starting price | $0 (free plan available) | $0 (free forever), then €20 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Free at any traffic volume for the standard product, with usage limits rather than price tiers; the enterprise tier (Analytics 360) is quote-only and sold through Google Cloud sales. | Freemium with a free forever plan, one flat self-serve paid plan priced by pageview volume via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier. |
| Free plan | The full standard product with no pageview or event volume charge, subject to 500 distinct event names per property, 50 custom dimensions, 50 custom metrics, 14-month maximum event-level retention, reporting sampling, and cardinality limits. | Free forever with unlimited pageviews under a fair-use policy, 5 websites, 1 user, and 30 days of data history. |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the standard product is permanently free | 14 days on the paid plan, no credit card required |
| Best for | Any business that runs Google Ads and needs conversion import, audience remarketing, and data-driven attribution inside Google's own ecosystem, plus larger sites that want a free raw event export into BigQuery and have someone able to write the SQL. | European site owners, bootstrapped SaaS companies, and privacy-conscious marketing teams who want a readable cookieless dashboard with no consent banner, plus GA4 users who want a parallel measurement layer that captures the visitors their banner and ad blockers are hiding. |
| Setup time | Fifteen minutes for the base tag and enhanced measurement; days to weeks for a configuration you can trust, because key events, ecommerce parameters, custom dimensions, cross-domain settings, and consent mode all need deliberate work. | Under ten minutes: paste one script, install the WordPress plugin, or deploy through Google Tag Manager, and data appears immediately. Proxying through your own domain for blocker resilience takes an extra half hour of DNS and routing work. |
| Learning curve | The steepest in this category by a wide margin. Standard reports are learnable in a session; Explore, attribution settings, and the event and parameter model genuinely take weeks, which is why a GA4 consulting industry exists. | Effectively none for the dashboard, which is the entire design goal. Events, the export API, and the BI connectors are the only pieces that need documentation time. |
| Platforms | Web app, iOS and Android SDKs via Firebase, Google Tag Manager, Measurement Protocol (server-side), Looker Studio connector | Web app (EU-hosted cloud), WordPress plugin, Google Tag Manager, Looker Studio connector, Power BI connector |
| Compliance | GDPR (with consent required), CCPA, Google Consent Mode v2, Data Processing Terms and EU Standard Contractual Clauses | GDPR, ePrivacy Directive and PECR, CCPA, CNIL and DSGVO alignment, SOC 2 in progress |
| Founded | 2005 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | Mountain View, California, United States | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Ownership | Public company (Alphabet Inc., NASDAQ: GOOGL) | Bootstrapped; 100 percent owned by its founders with no outside investors |
Strengths and limitations
Google Analytics 4
Strengths
- Free at unlimited traffic volume, which no privacy-first competitor can match once a site passes a few hundred thousand pageviews a month.
- The only analytics tool that can import conversions into Google Ads for bidding and export behavioural audiences for remarketing, which is decisive if paid search is a real channel.
- Data-driven attribution across Google and non-Google channels, plus behavioural and conversion modelling that partially recovers consent-declined traffic.
- Free raw event export to BigQuery gives genuinely unlimited retention and unsampled analysis for teams with SQL skills.
Limitations
- The interface is genuinely hostile to non-specialists; simple questions require Explore, and Explore requires understanding scope, cardinality, and dimension compatibility.
- Requires a cookie consent banner in the EU and UK, and the traffic that declines disappears into modelled estimates rather than being measured.
- Standard properties delete event-level data after 14 months, so year-over-year analysis in Explore breaks unless you run a BigQuery pipeline.
- Sampling, thresholding, and the (other) row on high-cardinality dimensions mean numbers are directional; GA4 will not reconcile line by line with your order database.
Simple Analytics
Strengths
- A free forever plan with unlimited pageviews under fair use and five websites, which no other serious privacy-first tool matches on volume.
- Flat €20 pricing up to 2.5 million pageviews means most small businesses never have to model a traffic slider or worry about overages.
- The strongest privacy architecture claims in the group: no cookies, no browser storage, no IP storage, no visitor IDs, EU hosting under a Dutch entity.
- The traffic recovery positioning is commercially honest, acknowledging that most businesses will keep GA4 and selling a complement rather than pretending a replacement is realistic.
Limitations
- Per-seat pricing at €20 per additional user is expensive relative to competitors that bundle three to ten team members into the base price.
- The free plan's 30-day history window means trend analysis and year-over-year comparison are impossible without paying, unlike free tiers that limit volume instead.
- SOC 2 is described as in progress rather than complete, which will stall some procurement reviews that a competitor with a finished report would pass.
- SSO, role-based access, and raw data access sit behind a demo-gated Enterprise tier, so the self-serve product has a hard ceiling for larger teams.
Pricing compared
Google Analytics 4
Free at any traffic volume for the standard product, with usage limits rather than price tiers; the enterprise tier (Analytics 360) is quote-only and sold through Google Cloud sales.
- Google Analytics 4 (standard)$0
- Google Analytics 360Custom
Free is an unbeatable price for what GA4 does at the ad-integration layer, and no competitor at any price can import conversions into Google Ads or run Google's data-driven attribution. Judged purely as a dashboard, though, GA4 is expensive in the currency that actually constrains a small business, which is attention: the interface, the consent banner, the 14-month retention ceiling, and the sampling all cost hours or accuracy that a $19 tool would have given back. The rational allocation for most small businesses is to keep GA4 installed for the Google Ads link and pay a small amount for something readable to look at daily.
Simple Analytics
Freemium with a free forever plan, one flat self-serve paid plan priced by pageview volume via a slider, per-seat add-ons, and a quote-only Enterprise tier.
- Free€0
- Self-serve (paid)€20
- EnterpriseCustom
The free plan is the most useful free offer in privacy-first analytics because it does not meter your traffic, and for a small site the 30-day history limit is genuinely liveable for months. The €20 paid plan buys unusual headroom, since 2.5 million pageviews for a flat fee undercuts what Plausible or Fathom charge at the same volume. The value breaks down on teams: at €20 per extra seat, a marketing department of five costs €100 a month for a tool whose competitors bundle ten users, so this is best value as a one-person or two-person purchase and worst value as a departmental one.
Editorial verdict on each
Google Analytics 4
GA4 is not a good product and it is still the right default for most small businesses, which is an uncomfortable thing to write. It is free at any volume, it is the only tool that can push conversions and audiences into Google Ads, and its data-driven attribution has no free equivalent. Against that: a hostile interface, a mandatory consent banner in Europe, a 14-month retention ceiling, sampling, and an attribution model list that got shorter rather than longer. Keep it if you spend money on Google Ads, because nothing else closes that loop. If you do not, install Plausible, Fathom, Simple Analytics, Pirsch, or Umami instead and enjoy getting your afternoons back.
Read the full Google Analytics 4 profileSimple Analytics
InnovationSimple Analytics is the most sensible starting point in privacy-first analytics for a one-person or two-person business, because the free plan gives you unlimited traffic on five sites and only asks for money when you want history back. The €20 paid plan buys unusual pageview headroom, the AI assistant is a better interface than any report builder for non-analysts, and the Dutch EU-only architecture is the cleanest answer available to a European privacy review. Two things to check before buying: seats cost €20 each, which makes it a poor fit for a marketing department of five, and SOC 2 is still in progress. The traffic recovery pitch is the most honest thing any vendor in this category says out loud, which is that you are probably not deleting GA4, so buy the tool that gives you the numbers you can actually trust while Google keeps feeding your ads.
Read the full Simple Analytics profileGoogle Analytics 4 profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Simple Analytics last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.