vs Google Analytics
GA4 is free. The banner is not.
Google Analytics is a free ads product that happens to draw charts. Cookie Free Analytics is a 1 KB pageview counter that does not need a cookie, a consent popup, or a tag manager.
| Cookie Free Analytics | Google Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Hobby free, paid from €4 | Free, then GA360 |
| Cookies | None | Yes |
| EU cookie banner | Not for this script | Usually required |
| Script | Under 1 KB gzipped | Tens of KB + GTM |
| Hosted | Frankfurt + Ireland | Google Cloud, US terms |
| Visitor identity | HMAC, salt deleted daily | Client ID across sessions |
| Blocked by extensions | Less often | Often |
| What you see | Pageviews, sources, goals | Everything, often sampled |
What they actually are
GA4 is an advertising and attribution suite. The charts are how Google makes the ads graph more valuable. That is a legitimate product. It is the wrong instrument for “how many people opened the article”.
When to pick them
You buy Google Ads and need native conversions, remarketing, or BigQuery export. Keep GA4 for that. We will not pretend to replace Google’s ads stack.
When to pick us
You want the visits the banner and the blockers threw away. Paste our script next to GA. Wait a week. The difference is the consent gap — not a 400,000-pageview case study we invented.
The honest bit
GA4 is free, has more reports than we will ever ship, and is the default in every marketing deck. We are not “GA but private”. We are a smaller, honest count.
Questions
- Is Cookie Free Analytics a Google Analytics alternative?
- For pageviews, sources, campaigns, and goals — yes. It is not an ads or attribution suite. Many sites run both: GA4 for campaigns that need Google, Cookie Free Analytics for the unblocked count.
- Why are Cookie Free Analytics numbers higher than GA4?
- Usually consent reject, ad blockers, and Safari defaults — not extra bots. We do not invent a case study. Compare a week of both.
- Do I need a cookie banner for Cookie Free Analytics?
- The script does not set cookies, use localStorage, or fingerprint. Beacon is POST JSON; query is allowlisted. Same-day uniques are HMAC with a pepper and a salt we delete. Your counsel still owns the final call. Recipe: /methodology.
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