Head to head
Google Analytics 4 vs Plausible Analytics
Free and enormous, or nine pounds and legible. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Google Analytics 4
4.4/10
No. 30 of 30
Plausible Analytics
8.0/10
No. 2 of 30
This is the most searched comparison in the category, and it is really a question about what free costs. GA4 is free of charge, deeply integrated with Google Ads, and installed on a very large share of the web. Plausible is £9 a month, EU-hosted, cookieless, and fits on one screen.
The honest framing is that these are not the same product aimed at the same person. GA4 is an advertising measurement platform that also does site analytics. Plausible is site analytics and nothing else.
The verdict
Plausible, for anybody whose main question is how their website is doing.
The decisive issue is not features, it is completeness. GA4 sets cookies, so in the UK and EU it needs consent and every visitor who declines is simply missing. It is also the most blocked script on the web, and it applies thresholding to low-volume rows and sampling in explorations. The number in the dashboard is a filtered projection and almost nobody using it has measured by how much. Plausible needs no banner, is blocked far less, and reports what happened.
The second issue is time. GA4's move away from the session model made it a specialist tool, and reports that took two clicks now take a custom exploration. Plausible is legible to a marketing manager on first opening, which matters because the analytics that changes decisions is the analytics somebody actually opens.
Keep GA4 if you spend on Google Ads. Its conversion signal feeds smart bidding and Plausible cannot replace it. The sensible arrangement for advertisers is both: GA4 for the ad platform, Plausible as the dashboard you read.
Side by side
| Google Analytics 4 | Plausible Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 4.4 / 10 | 8.0 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 30 of 30 | No. 2 of 30 |
| From | Free with paid GA360 quoted | £9 per month |
| What that buys | Free at ordinary volumes; the GA360 enterprise tier is a six-figure annual contract | 10,000 monthly pageviews, on a Starter tier |
| Free tier | Yes, the standard product is free | No, but the community edition is free to self-host |
| Cookies | Yes, so consent is required in the EU and UK | None, so no consent banner |
| Script size | Tens of kilobytes, more through Tag Manager | About 1 KB |
| Hosting | EU, on European-owned infrastructure | |
| Trading since | 2005, as GA4 since 2020 | 2019 |
| Price | Free; GA360 quoted at six figures | £9/mo at 10k pageviews |
| Cookie banner in the UK and EU | Required | Never required |
| Script size | Tens of kilobytes, more via Tag Manager | About 1 KB |
| Sampling and thresholding | Both applied | Neither |
| Time to a useful report | Hours to days of configuration | Minutes |
| Google Ads conversion bidding | Supported, effectively exclusive | Not supported |
| Who holds the data | Google, on its own terms | Plausible, EU-hosted, or self-host it |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Google Analytics 4 | Plausible Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 6 | 9 |
| Privacy architecture | 2 | 9 |
| Value for money | 7 | 8 |
| Setup and time to data | 3 | 9 |
| Script weight | 2 | 9 |
| Analytical depth | 8 | 7 |
| Behaviour tooling | 3 | 2 |
| Data ownership | 4 | 8 |
| Accuracy | 4 | 8 |
| Vendor conduct | 3 | 7 |
| Weighted overall | 4.4 | 8.0 |
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 Plausible Analytics if
You want to know how your site is doing, without a consent banner, a tag manager or a training course.
Choose Google Analytics 4 if
You spend meaningfully on Google Ads and need the conversion signal, or you need BigQuery and Looker Studio in one ecosystem.
Common questions
Is Plausible a good replacement for Google Analytics?
For website measurement, yes, and it ships a Google Analytics importer so your history comes across. The one thing it cannot replace is Google Ads conversion bidding, which is exclusive to GA4. Advertisers usually run both.
Why does Plausible show more traffic than GA4?
Because it counts visitors GA4 never sees. GA4 needs consent, so everyone who declines is absent, and it is the most blocked script on the web. Plausible needs no prompt and is blocked far less, so it reports a more complete picture.
Is Plausible worth paying for when GA4 is free?
That depends on what free costs you. GA4 is free of charge and paid for in consent friction, data handed to an advertising company, short default retention and the specialist time to get answers out of it. At £9 a month the question is really whether you will open it, and most people open Plausible more.
Can I use both Plausible and GA4?
Yes, and for advertisers it is the sensible setup. Keep GA4 feeding Google Ads and use Plausible as the dashboard. Plausible's script is about a kilobyte, so running both costs almost nothing in performance.
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 Plausible Analytics, or tell me where I have got something wrong.