Head to head
Google Analytics 4 vs Matomo
The same depth, on very different terms. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Google Analytics 4
4.4/10
No. 30 of 30
Matomo
7.0/10
No. 8 of 30
This is the closest feature-for-feature comparison on the list. Matomo has spent eighteen years being the thing you install when you want Google Analytics without Google, and it now matches or exceeds GA4 on most of the analytical surface: funnels, user flows, custom reports, multi-channel attribution, a tag manager, A/B testing, heatmaps and session recording, plus roll-up reporting that GA4 handles awkwardly.
GA4 is free. Matomo is free too, if you run it yourself.
The verdict
Matomo, for any organisation that does not depend on Google Ads smart bidding, and the reasons are ownership and accuracy rather than features.
Self-hosted Matomo keeps every raw event on your infrastructure with no sampling and no thresholding. GA4 applies thresholding to low-volume rows and sampling in explorations, so there are questions it will simply decline to answer, and it will not always be obvious that it has. Matomo can also be configured to run cookieless with IP anonymisation, which in many jurisdictions removes the consent banner entirely, and the banner is the single largest source of missing data in a GA4 deployment.
The cost is operational and it is not trivial. Self-hosting means PHP, MySQL, patching, backups and archiving jobs that get slower as the database grows. Budget for that honestly or take Matomo Cloud from twenty-two euros a month, which is expensive against the cookieless field but cheap against the alternative of doing it badly.
Keep GA4 alongside if you buy Google Ads. The conversion signal is the one thing here that is genuinely exclusive.
Side by side
| Google Analytics 4 | Matomo | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 4.4 / 10 | 7.0 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 30 of 30 | No. 8 of 30 |
| From | Free with paid GA360 quoted | Free self-hosted; cloud from €22 |
| What that buys | Free at ordinary volumes; the GA360 enterprise tier is a six-figure annual contract | On-premise is free; Matomo Cloud starts at €22 a month for 50,000 hits |
| Free tier | Yes, the standard product is free | Yes, the entire on-premise product |
| Cookies | Yes, so consent is required in the EU and UK | Optional, and it runs cookieless if configured |
| Script size | Tens of kilobytes, more through Tag Manager | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | Your own servers, or EU cloud | |
| Trading since | 2005, as GA4 since 2020 | 2007, as Piwik |
| Price | Free; GA360 quoted, six figures | Free self-hosted; Cloud from €22/mo at 50k hits |
| Who holds the raw data | You, if self-hosted | |
| Sampling and thresholding | Both applied | Neither; no data sampling |
| Cookie banner | Required in the UK and EU | Avoidable with cookieless configuration |
| Heatmaps and session recording | Not offered | Included, with allowances on Cloud |
| Google Ads conversion bidding | Supported, effectively exclusive | Not supported |
| Data retention | Short by default, configurable | 24 months raw on Cloud, reports kept indefinitely |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Google Analytics 4 | Matomo |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 6 | 8 |
| Privacy architecture | 2 | 8 |
| Value for money | 7 | 7 |
| Setup and time to data | 3 | 4 |
| Script weight | 2 | 3 |
| Analytical depth | 8 | 9 |
| Behaviour tooling | 3 | 7 |
| Data ownership | 4 | 10 |
| Accuracy | 4 | 7 |
| Vendor conduct | 3 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 4.4 | 7.0 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose Matomo if
You want GA4's analytical depth without handing the data to an advertising company, and you can host it or pay for Cloud.
Choose Google Analytics 4 if
You spend on Google Ads and need the conversion signal, or you need BigQuery and Looker Studio in one ecosystem.
Common questions
Is Matomo a drop-in replacement for Google Analytics?
Close to it on reporting, and it ships a Google Analytics importer so historic data comes across. The one thing it cannot replace is Google Ads conversion bidding, which is exclusive to GA4.
Does Matomo avoid the cookie banner?
It can. Configured to run without cookies and with IP anonymisation, many jurisdictions treat it as exempt from consent. That is configuration you must get right, unlike tools that never had cookies to disable.
Which gives more accurate numbers?
Matomo, in a properly configured cookieless deployment, because it counts visitors who would have declined a GA4 consent prompt and it applies neither sampling nor thresholding.
What does self-hosting Matomo actually involve?
A PHP and MySQL application you keep patched and backed up, plus archiving jobs configured to run on a schedule. The common failure is leaving archiving unconfigured, after which the dashboard goes quietly stale as data grows.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for Google Analytics 4 and Matomo, or tell me where I have got something wrong.