18 Google Analytics/GA4 Alternatives to Measure Your Website Traffic

Google Analytics is a must-use tool to track your website traffic. Nearly 55% of all the websites online use Google Analytics; that’s huge!

There are some features that Google Analytics lacks, which forced the web admins to search for an alternative.

In this article, we will tell you why you need Google Analytics alternatives and which ones you might find worth trying.

So let’s get started!

The popularity of Google Analytics Amongst Website Owners & Businesses

In the era of digitization, almost every business is busy building its online presence.

It becomes crucial for businesses to check whether their website fulfills their business goals or not.

For this, they require robust web analytics software that answers some significant questions, such as:

• What do people do when they visit my website?
• How long do they stay? 
• What pages do they visit?

Of all the business analytics tools used today, the most popular is Google Analytics, with 86% of the market share. Nearly 28 million sites are live on Google Analytics at any time of the day.

So, what makes Google Analytics (Aka – GA) popular among website owners and small businesses? Let’s dive in.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics software. It helps businesses gain deeper insights into their website performance, such as

• Overall website traffic
• Where’s the traffic coming from?
• Which keyword draws the most traffic?
• Which pages bring more engagements?

And much more.

Not only this, the data can be further drilled down to see the page views, bounce rates, retention rates, and session durations.

But, despite having a huge customer base, many web admins view Google Analytics as a complicated tool.

So if you’re one of them, the following reasons might be one of your problems with GA.

Why Would You Need An Alternative For Google Analytics?

From a business perspective, a free analytical tool from the biggest ad-tech company is a delight. Yet, it does come with some limitations.

Let’s address some of GA’s downsides that make it a secondary choice for some webmasters.

#1. It’s a Bulging Script that Affects Your Website Speed

Do you know? Google Analytics adds extra weight to your web pages like any other website element.

To integrate GA with your website, you need to install a tag. The tag weighs 28kb and comes along with a secondary javascript which weighs 17kb.

So, when you integrate GA with your website, you add 45 kb of page weight to each page load – slowing down its loading time.

For those who are cautious about their website speed, Kbs matter!

#2. It Uses Sampled Data Resulting in Biased Insights

Google Analytics uses only a subset of your website’s data to analyze and determine the overall results.

This means GA narrows down its processing load by sampling uniform data types.

Let’s take an example to understand it better.

Suppose you need to count the number of trees on a 100-acre land where the distribution is uniform. If you’re smart enough, you would count the number of trees in 1 acre and multiply it by 100. 

Simple calculation?

Likewise, GA samples your website data to reduce its processing time. But, unlike the example given above, your website visitors are not reasonably uniform.

Every visitor has their own buyer’s journey, and sampling won’t provide you with accurate and actionable insights.

#3. Free Plan Doesn’t Have Access to Raw Data

With Google Analytics, you can access aggregated data presented to you in a summarized format instead of raw data.

This might make things difficult for marketing experts who rely completely on raw data. Why so?

As per marketing experts, raw data comes directly from the source and remains unfabricated. Thus, perfect for in-depth insights and accurate results.

Also, since you have unprocessed data, you can mold it as per your needs and perform advanced evaluations.

You can also visualize raw data. For instance, you can export it to business intelligence and visualization tools such as Tableau and Sisense.

By doing this, you connect many data sources and then clean, shape, and model your data set into your desired report.

Unfortunately, Google Analytics allows you to work with raw data only with its paid version. But still, some blockers prevail, and you somehow don’t get 100% data.

#4. Overwhelming for the Majority of Webmasters

Google Analytics is a powerful but complex tool with a significant learning curve. Most site owners use only a fraction of its metrics to analyze their websites or businesses.

Google Analytics has 125 items in its left navigation bar, which generate different reports to get you diversified insights. These items track more than 290 other metrics combined.

That’s too much.

Analyzing all these metrics is a full-time job and becomes overwhelming for business owners.

Many GA users create custom dashboards with only a few valuable metrics and ignore everything else that GA does.

#5. It’s Blocked by Many Plugins & Browsers

It’s fascinating that top web browsers like Firebox, Brave, and Apple Safari have blocked Google Analytics from tracking visitors’ activities.

Yes, an experiment conducted by Wesley Aptekar-Cassels showed that out of 1,253 sample users, 565 blocked Google Analytics.

The breakdown was as follows:

Here’s the breakdown according to the OS used:

The rapid growth in the use of ad blockers among users has hampered the accuracy provided by Google Analytics.

As per reports, 42.7% of internet users worldwide use an ad blocker.

So now it’s clear why the embed script provided by Google often gets blocked from tracking users’ movement across platforms.

The lesser data it collects, the more fragile the results are.

#6. The shift from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4.

This is probably one of the main reasons many web admins are looking for alternative web analytics tools. Google Analytics has announced that they will be retiring Universal Analytics from July 2023, and to use GA4, website owners need to set up GA4 code on their websites.

Some of the users’ experience with GA4 has not been the best, as it has its own steep learning curve. It also involves unlearning the concepts of Universal Analytics, which has taken a bit of effort to learn.

Users may consider checking out some other tools before Universal Analytics is discontinued and make an informed decision on whether to move to GA4 or opt for a new tool.

Let’s now look at the best Google Analytics Alternatives.

Fathom

Fathom is a website analytics software that provides you with accurate insights. It does everything without compromising visitors’ privacy and respecting all the privacy laws.

Why is Fathom Better than Google Analytics?

• Fathom helps you gain better insights into your business performance while respecting your privacy.
• Fathom embed script loads faster on your website when compared to Google Analytics javascript, which slows your webpage loading time

Features

• Bypass Ad-blockers: The embed script configured with a DNS record allows you to bypass ad-blockers by using a unique subdomain for every site
• Privacy Regulations: Respectful to privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, PECR, etc.
• Quick Loading Time: Its web analytics script loads faster due to custom domains serving in 70 locations worldwide

If you want to learn about all your visitors (not just half) and still hail visitors’ privacy, you can trust Fathom’s web analytical services.

Clicky

Clicky is a privacy-friendly web analytics software. It’s one of the best alternatives to Google Analytics due to its user-friendly interface and easy implementation.

Why is Clicky Better than Google Analytics?

• As we said earlier, Clicky has a user-friendly interface. This makes it easy to use and requires minimal knowledge to understand and work with.
• Clicky allows for quick and relevant data viewing in real time, enabling users to extract insights and act on them instantly.

Features

• Onsite Analysis: Track visitor’s journey across your site and launch heatmaps without even leaving your website
• Uptime Monitoring: Receive real-time alerts when your site goes offline and take immediate action to resolve it
• Referrer Spam & Bot Filtering: Aggressively filter out bots and spam from your data to get accurate insights

In contrast to Google Analytics, Clicky is an easy-to-use web analytics tool. If you like the Google Analytics interface and are looking for a similar alternative, Clicky might be the one.

Plausible

Plausible is a lightweight open-source web analytics software. It offers website owners valuable and actionable stats with its easy-to-understand analytics.

Why is Plausible Better than Google Analytics?

• Google Analytics collects too many data points. This makes it difficult to understand and requires proper training to get the most out of it. Whereas, Plausible cuts through all the unnecessary data and makes it easy to use, understand and make data-driven decisions.
• Plausible is an open-source tool. Its source code is readily available on websites like Github and can be self-hosted. On the other hand, Google Analytics is a closed platform, and you might never know what goes behind the scenes. All you can do is trust Google.

Features

• Simple Metrics: Get all the key metrics to analyze your website in a simple and easy-to-understand dashboard
• Lightweight Script: Embeds a lightweight script (<1Kb) to your web pages without harming your website speed
• Privacy Focused: Carry out site measurement anonymously without annoying your visitors with cookie/GDPR consent banners.

Plausible is a team-oriented analytics tool trusted by 30,000+ customers globally.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is another alternative to Google Analytics, with a mission to deliver web analytics services to everyone owning a website without compromising the privacy of their visitors.

Why is Cloudflare Better than Google Analytics?

• Cloudflare provides you with all essential data quickly under one dashboard. In contrast, Google Analytics presents multiple dashboards with many unnecessary metrics, making it complex to understand.
• Cloudflare web analytic software is non-invasive and respects your visitors’ privacy.

Features

• All-in-One Dashboard: Get all essential stats from your website in a single dashboard within a minute
• No Cookie Banners: The software doesn’t track your visitors’ movement across websites or collect personal information
• Lightweight Script: Embed a lightweight script into your web pages to track performance without hampering your website speed

Cloudflare is a great Google Analytics alternative if you want to analyze your web vitals quickly and easily.

Gaug.es

Gaug.es is an analytics tool that helps you monitor and track your visitors in real-time. It offers highly accurate and live data for businesses of any size.

Why is Gaug.es Better than Google Analytics?

• Gauges provide you with data in real-time. All your stats are automatically updated within seconds without hitting the refresh button.
• Gaug.es is easy to understand. You don’t need to be a pro webmaster to use the tool.

Features

• Real-Time Data: Get access to every new visitor as soon as they come in without refreshing or synching with live site analytics
• Top-Content Analysis: Automatically analyze your top-performing content with its powerful tool and create content based on data-driven insights
• Geo-Tracking: Get to know where your visitors are coming from with real-time air traffic data

Gaug.es has a trusted customer base of 50,000+ customers globally. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use tool, Gaug.es is the solution.

Clarity

Clarity is a free-to-use web analysis tool from Microsoft. It helps businesses and website owners get valuable insights into how real visitors engage with their websites.

Why is Microsoft Clarity Better than Google Analytics?

• GA’s free plan puts a cap on the volume of recordings and sessions. At the same time, you can use Clarity for free and also record every session.
• Clarity’s filtering control and advanced customization help you segment data. In comparison, Google Analytics doesn’t provide you with data segmentation.

Features of Clarity

• Advanced Heatmaps: Create instant heat maps to see which areas on your page drive the most engagement and which pages need improvement
• Session Recordings: Record and share all your sessions with your team members to discuss potential issues and work on improving them in real-time
• Powerful Insights: Discover meaningful user behavior and make data-driven decisions with in-depth insights powered by machine learning

100,000+ customers trust Microsoft Clarity, making it the 15th most popular tool on the internet in the audience measurement category.

Matomo

Matomo, previously known as Piwik Web Analytics, is an open-source web analytics tool. It gives in-depth reports on your website visitors, your most viewed page, the keywords driving the most traffic, etc.

Why is Matomo Better than Google Analytics?

• You can use Matomo without cookie consent banners, but this doesn’t apply to Google Analytics.
• GA’s Terms of Service clarifies that using its services gives them the right to keep and use the data you collect for personal analysis. In comparison, Matomo gives you 100% ownership of your data.

Features

• Visitors Profile: Evaluate every action taken by a visitor on your website and compile it into a full-blown visitor’s journey map.
• Seamless Integration: Easily integrate with 100+ software, including content management systems, eCommerce websites, and web development tools
• Limitless Tracking: Track what you want and how much you want with no cap on maximum sessions or numbers

Matomo is a fantastic alternative to Google Analytics. It has over 2,900,000+ global customers and ranks as the 4th most popular site on the entire internet in the Audience Measurement category.

Since it’s an open-source self-hosted solution, you can get Matomo on Kamatera for as low as $4 per month.

W3Counter

W3counter is another free web analytic software. It helps businesses learn more about their website visitors, build a customer base, increase sales, and track business growth.

Why is W3counter Better than Google Analytics?

• W3Counter doesn’t have a steep learning curve. It’s quick to understand and easy to use.

Features

• User-Friendly Dashboards: Clear and simple dashboard to extract data without any manual or training
• Track Visitors Journey: Learn more about your visitors, see where they live, what languages they speak, and what kind of devices they browse your site on
• Identify Traffic Sources: Easily identify key traffic sources and what content your visitors are looking for on your website.

W3counter is one of the best alternatives to Google Analytics. Its intuitive dashboard provides an overview of your website performance at a glance.

Simple Analytics

Another popular alternative to GA is Simple Analytics. As the name suggests, Simple analytics gives you insights into some simple yet impactful website tracking KPIs.

Why is Simple Analytics Better than Google Analytics?

• If you ever get concerned about your company and visitors’ privacy, Simple Analytics is your privacy-oriented alternative to Google Analytics.
• Compared to GA, Simple Analytics is a lightweight tool, and its script doesn’t add extra burden to your web pages. 

Features

• Attractive Dashboard: A clean and simple dashboard interface that allows you to overview your website performance in one go
• Email Reports: Delivers your website performance reports in your inbox or sends reports directly to your clients with a click.
• Tweet Viewer: See the exact tweet from where your traffic is coming in real-time
• Bypass ad-blockers: Setup a subdomain link and simply add a DNS setting to get 100% data with its advanced Bypass ad-blocker

Simple Analytics is a privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative. If you are keen on the privacy of your data and your visitors’ data, this is the tool for you.

MixPanel

MixPanel is a powerful web analytics tool that comes with an easy-to-understand interface. 

It’s a leading Google Analytics alternative that requires you to have no expertise or training to extract meaningful data from the tool.

Why is MixPanel Better than Google Analytics?

• Seamless cross-device tracking and reporting across multiple user sessions.
• MixPanel collects unsampled and accurate user data for real-time analysis.

Features

• Interactive Reports: Learn more about your product and your audience with visualized data charts and figures
• Limitless Segmentation: Get to the roots of your problems with its reliable ad-hoc analysis tool
• Data Integration: Use its powerful connectors to set up and explore product and user behavior without SQL

With over 1M+ customers, MixPanel ranks as the 8th most popular website on the internet in the audience measurement category. 

Piwik PRO 

Piwik PRO is an analytics suite for customer journey analysis that focuses on data security and user privacy. 

Why is Piwik PRO Better than Google Analytics?

• Piwik PRO ensures compliance with privacy laws like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA.
• It uses EU-based safe cloud servers to store your data, or you can choose to go for on-premise hosting.

Features

• Digital User Experience Analysis: Piwik PRO offers you options for private cloud and on-premise to have full control over the data.
• Expert Customer Care: Expert consultation is available for all kinds of guidance, like business goal mapping, deployment management, and setting up custom reports.
• Flexible Data Privacy Management: It does not sell your data to third parties and offers 100% control over data residency.

Piwik PRO helps you utilize the right data for better acquisition and sales through campaign optimization and tailored customer experience. 

Heap

Heap claims to be the only digital insight platform where you can get a complete overview of your customer journey for enhanced conversion and retention.

Why is Heap Better than Google Analytics?

• Heap offers a combination of quantitative behavioral analysis and qualitative session replay on a single platform.
• It automatically reveals hidden insights into your products, app, or website.

Features

• Automatically Provides Complete Dataset: Heap automatically captures the complete digital experience of every user on every platform and presents the dataset in s single snippet.
• Session Replay: It offers integrated session replay to showcase the complete convex of every action.
• Integration Support: It can be integrated with 100+ apps so that you can constantly monitor user behavior.

Heap is ideal for data-driven decision-making as it offers an elevated analytics experience with digital insights and reactive reporting.

Adobe Analytics

Using Adobe Analytics, you get actionable insights that allow you to analyze data from any point of the user journey. 

Why is Adobe Analytics Better than Google Analytics?

• Adobe Analytics offers a better interface than Google Analytics.
• It provides better data models, along with more metrics and dimensions that organizations can use. 

Features

• Faster Web Analytics Results: Adobe Analytics uses the Adobe Experience Platform for faster web analytics results.
• Integration with Adobe Target: It can be integrated with Adobe Target, where you can use it as a single source of truth for A/B testing and other strategies.
• Personal Analytics: It helps you get real-time insights and actionable views into customers to deliver them personal experiences.

On Adobe Analytics, you also get robust features like predictive intelligence, versatile reporting, and holistic marketing analytics.

GoSquared Analytics

GoSquared Analytics is a platform for simple, fresh, and private web analytics where you can access web metrics without any learning curve.

Why is GoSquared Analytics Better than Google Analytics?

• Instead of showing you general-purpose analytics, GoSquared focuses on real-time analytics data.
• It offers premium integration and consultation services and anonymizes website visitors.

Features

• Intuitive Dashboard: GoSquared dashboard looks perfect on any device and can be used for collaborative analysis.
• No Setup Needed: After installing this application on your website, the dashboard does not need any additional setup.
• Privacy-Focused: It does not resell your data and complies with GDPR for data collection.

This quick-loading application also offers daily email reports on key metrics and other crucial insights.

Smartlook

Businesses searching for visual user insights and comprehensive product analytics should go for Smartlook, where they will get quantitative and qualitative analytics.

Why is Smartlook Better than Google Analytics?

• Smartlook’s qualitative analytics tells you what quantitive analytics can not.
• It helps you visually understand how users interact with your app.

Features

• Cross-Platform: Smartlook combines web and mobile analytics to track the entire user journey.
• Session Recording: This feature lets you see what users do on your website or app to help you know why they did not take the desired action.
• Event-Based Analytics: Smartlook helps you see all the user actions through event statistics.

Smartlook can be integrated with 50+ tools, including Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, and Mixpanel. 

Countly

Countly is a reliable privacy-centric analytics platform providing insights into user interaction with your digital products and services.

Why is Countly Better than Google Analytics?

• Countly give you direct database access to raw analytics data in real time. 
• It ensures 100% compliance with GDPR, HIPAA, and other regulations.

Features

• Feature-Rich Solution: Countly boasts 70+ tools to craft great customer journeys from an all-in-one solution.
• Individual Customer Experience Insights: It enables you to understand comprehensive user behavior across all platforms.
• Performance Monitoring Tools: The software lets you track the health and performance of your application by tracking crashes and errors.

With features like funnel insights and heatmaps, it offers a step-by-step understanding of user behavior.

PostHog

PostHog is an open-source suite of data tools that are built on the modern data stack.

Why is PostHog Better than Google Analytics?

• PostHog lets you perform self-hosted installation and deployment.
• It allows companies to add unlimited team members to access analytics data.

Features

• Product Analytics: PostHog offers you insights into path analysis, funnels, trend charts, retention graphs, and many more.
• Regulatory Compliance: It stores your user data being fully compliant with data privacy laws and by anonymizing users.
• Select Hosting Location: You can choose to store user data in the US or EU locations.

On this product OS, you can also perform tasks like A/B testing, capture events, heatmaps, and feature flags for product development.

Counter

Counter makes web analytics privacy-friendly so that you do not have to worry about storing and using your user data compliantly.

Why is Counter Better than Google Analytics?

• Counter’s source code is published under the AGPL-v3 license, where anyone can contribute to making it better.
• It does not force you to pay. Users can make a monetary contribution if they want.

Features

• Open-Source: Counter is open-source software that is available on GitHub for collaboration.
• Protects Your Privacy: This platform does not collect any cookies. Also, it does not need you to log in or collect your IP address.
• See What You Want: While Counter can provide you with common metrics, it keeps things simple by showing you what you want to see.

It is possible to integrate it with platforms like Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix.

Conclusion

If you’re wondering what’s the best Google Alternative, the answer is – it depends.

It depends on what type of alternative you’re looking for. Do you want the one that’s easy to use? Or do you want the free one?

Here’s a table that might help you figure out, what’s the best GA alternative for you:

Try the one you think might be the right fit for your business, and increase your website traffic with the suitable Google Analytics alternative.