GA4, Plausible and GhostMetrics compared honestly for 2026 — where each one genuinely wins on privacy, features, pricing and ease of use.
Three tools, three different jobs. Here's the honest one-liner for each before we get into the detail.
If you live inside Google Ads, need funnels, audiences, path exploration and raw event export to BigQuery, nothing else on this page competes on price (free) or integration depth. You pay in complexity and privacy overhead: a real learning curve, and a cookie-consent banner in most of the world.
Lightweight, cookieless, and — crucially — open-source under a copyleft license. If you need to read the code, self-host it, or guarantee EU data residency for compliance, Plausible is the safe default. It's a paid hosted product, with a free self-host route if you bring your own server.
Our tool. Free forever for one site with unlimited pageviews, real-time, no cookie banner, and a public live demo so you can judge before signing up. The honest caveat: the dashboard is a hosted, closed-source product — only the tracker is public. If you must self-host or read every line, Plausible wins that round.
These three tools all answer the same basic question — "who's visiting my site and what are they doing?" — but they were built for very different people, and understanding that origin story is the fastest way to pick the right one.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the current generation of Google's analytics platform, and it replaced the old Universal Analytics for good in 2023. It's an event-based system designed to unify web and app data under one measurement model, and it's engineered to feed Google's wider marketing stack: Google Ads, Search Console, and BigQuery for raw data warehousing. It is free at the standard tier, which is a big part of why it powers a huge share of the web. It is also, by design, a data-hungry product built by an advertising company — which is exactly the tension the other two tools were created to resolve.
Plausible is an independent, EU-based analytics product built as a deliberate reaction to GA's weight and privacy footprint. Its script is tiny, its dashboard is a single scrollable page, and the whole thing is open-source under a copyleft license. You can pay for the hosted version (data stored in the EU) or run the exact same code on your own infrastructure. Plausible's pitch is simplicity plus verifiability: cookieless by default, no personal data collected, and nothing hidden from you because you can read every line.
GhostMetrics is our cookieless web analytics product, built by Null Agency and dogfooded on our own sites — which is why there's a public live demo showing real traffic. The philosophy overlaps heavily with Plausible: privacy-first, cookieless, no consent banner. The difference is packaging and price. GhostMetrics is a hosted product with a genuinely free-forever tier for a single site and a flat, cheap Pro plan. The tradeoff is that the dashboard itself is closed-source; only the tracker script is public. We think that's a fair deal for people who want the privacy benefits without running servers — but we'll say plainly throughout this piece when it isn't the right fit.
This is where the gap between the three is largest, so it's worth being precise rather than sloganeering. All three can be run legally; they just put the compliance burden in very different places.
GA4 collects the most. By default it sets first-party cookies to recognize returning users, and features like Google Signals add cross-device identity when enabled. Google offers Consent Mode and IP-anonymization controls, and GA4 does not log full IP addresses in reports — but the platform is still built around identifying and re-identifying users across sessions to power audiences and remarketing. In practice that means that in the EU, UK and a growing list of jurisdictions, running GA4 correctly requires a cookie-consent banner, and visitors who decline are modeled rather than measured. That's not a knock on Google's engineering; it's the direct consequence of an analytics product designed to feed an ad network.
Plausible is cookieless and collects no personal data. It doesn't use persistent identifiers, and the hosted version stores data in the EU. Because there's nothing to consent to under the ePrivacy cookie rules, most sites run it without a banner. The strongest privacy argument for Plausible isn't a single feature though — it's that the code is open. You (or your DPO, or an auditor) can verify exactly what's collected instead of trusting a marketing page.
GhostMetrics is also cookieless and stores no cookies, no IP addresses, and no persistent IDs. To count unique visitors without tracking them, it derives a per-day visitor hash as SHA-256(daily-rotating salt | siteId | IP | UA), truncated to 64 bits and scoped per site — and the salt is deleted every day, so yesterday's hashes can't be reconstructed or linked to today's. It honors the Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals, and city-level geography is derived at the Cloudflare edge with the IP discarded immediately afterward. Because nothing personal persists, there's no consent banner to run. The honest caveat versus Plausible: you can't independently audit the dashboard, only the public tracker at /gm.js. If code-level verifiability is a hard requirement, that's a real point in Plausible's favor — we cover the whole cookieless landscape in our cookieless analytics compared guide.
If you only read the privacy section you'd think GA4 is the loser here. It isn't. When it comes to raw analytical horsepower, GA4 is comfortably ahead of both privacy tools, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
GA4's genuine advantages are worth listing plainly:
Plausible and GhostMetrics are deliberately simpler, and you should read that as a feature, not a gap they forgot to fill. Both give you the metrics that answer "is this working?" at a glance: top pages, entry and exit pages, traffic sources and referrers, countries, devices and browsers, and goal or custom-event conversions — all in real time on a single screen. GhostMetrics adds public dashboards and CSV export on its Pro plan; Plausible offers similar goal tracking, a stats API, and search-console integration. What neither one does is deep multi-dimensional exploration, remarketing audiences, or warehouse-grade raw export. If your weekly routine is building bespoke funnels and cohort analyses, GA4 is simply the better microscope. If your weekly routine is a 20-second glance to see what's trending, the microscope is overkill — and that's the honest dividing line.
Time-to-first-insight is where the two privacy tools pull ahead hard, and it's the single most underrated factor when people pick analytics.
GA4 is the heaviest lift. You create a property, configure a data stream, and install the tag either directly or — more commonly — through Google Tag Manager, which is its own product to learn. Then you define conversions, wire up enhanced measurement toggles, and, if you're compliant, integrate a consent-management platform so the banner actually controls the tag. None of this is unreasonable for a marketing team, but expect an afternoon, not five minutes, before the numbers mean anything. The interface itself has a real learning curve: the default reports are only the surface, and the powerful stuff lives in the Explore section that new users often never find.
Plausible is a single lightweight script tag in your <head>. Add it, and the dashboard populates in real time with no further configuration. Goals and custom events take a few extra minutes to define, but the base install is genuinely a one-liner, and there's nothing to consent-manage.
GhostMetrics is the same story: drop the gm.js tag on your site, set your data-site attribute, and the dashboard starts filling immediately — no cookie banner, no tag manager, no consent plumbing. Because we built it to watch our own launches, real-time was a first-class requirement, so pageviews, live visitor counts, and source breakdowns appear within seconds. You don't have to take our word for the experience, either — the live demo is the actual product running on real traffic, so you can click around the exact dashboard you'd get before you ever create an account.
The blunt summary: GA4 rewards the time you invest with depth; Plausible and GhostMetrics reward you with a working dashboard before your coffee gets cold. Pick based on which of those you actually need this quarter.
Pricing is where "it depends" earns its keep, because the three tools charge in completely different shapes. We'll only state numbers we can stand behind, and we won't invent competitor pricing.
GA4 is free at the standard tier, full stop — and that is a genuinely strong offer. There is a paid enterprise edition (Analytics 360) with higher limits and SLAs, but the vast majority of sites never touch it. The catch isn't a subscription line item; it's the hidden costs of the free tier: data sampling on large or complex queries, capped data-retention windows, and the engineering time to run consent management correctly. Free software with a compliance tax attached is still cheap — just not as cheap as the sticker suggests.
Plausible is a paid, hosted subscription priced by monthly pageviews, typically with a free trial to start. It is also open-source, so the self-hosted route costs you nothing in license fees — you pay in server time and maintenance instead. Because their published tiers change over time, we're deliberately not quoting a figure here; check their site for current pricing. The fair way to frame it: you're paying a modest amount to a small independent company for a privacy-clean tool you could also run yourself.
GhostMetrics pricing we can state exactly because it's ours. The Free plan is $0/forever and covers one site with unlimited pageviews, real-time data, every dashboard view, cookieless tracking and no consent banner — it is not a time-limited trial. Pro is a flat $9.99/mo (with a 30-day free trial) and adds unlimited sites, public shareable dashboards and CSV export. There are no per-pageview overage surprises; the Pro price is flat. For a solo site or a side project, "free forever with unlimited pageviews" is a hard offer to beat — and if you eventually outgrow it, the upgrade is one predictable line item.
If GA4's free-but-heavy model is what's pushing you to shop around, our roundup of the best GA4 alternative options walks through the tradeoffs in more depth than we can fit here.
"Who actually holds my data, and can I get it out?" is the question that separates these tools once compliance and lock-in enter the conversation.
GA4 stores your data inside Google's infrastructure, and the crown-jewel escape hatch is the free BigQuery export: you can stream raw, event-level data into a warehouse you control and keep it as long as you like. That's a legitimately powerful ownership story for data teams — but note the shape of it. The processed data lives in Google's ecosystem, the reporting UI is Google's, and the export is your responsibility to set up and maintain. You own a copy; Google owns the platform.
Plausible is the strongest answer on pure ownership, and it isn't close. The software is open-source under a copyleft license, so you can self-host the identical product and hold 100% of the data on your own servers, in a jurisdiction of your choosing. Even on the hosted plan you get a stats API and CSV export, and data is stored in the EU. If your requirement is "I must be able to audit the code and own the database outright," Plausible is the tool built for exactly that. It's worth knowing the wider field too — we compare the self-hostable options in our Plausible alternatives guide, since Umami and a few others compete on the same open-source ground.
GhostMetrics is the most honest place for us to state a limitation. The dashboard is a hosted, closed-source product — you cannot self-host it or read its source. What is public is the tracker at /gm.js, so you can verify exactly what gets collected on the client. On the export side, Pro plans include CSV export and public shareable dashboards, so your data isn't trapped behind a paywall or an API you have to reverse-engineer. Our position is deliberately un-slick about this: if open-source or strict, guaranteed EU residency is a hard requirement, GhostMetrics is not your tool, and we'll actively point you to Plausible or Umami. By default GhostMetrics runs on US Cloudflare infrastructure, with EU residency available on request. For everyone whose requirement is "cookieless, cheap, no banner, and I don't want to run servers," the closed dashboard is a reasonable trade — but you should make that trade with your eyes open.
The quick scan. As always, "simpler" in the Plausible and GhostMetrics columns is a design choice, not a missing feature.
| Google Analytics 4 | Plausible | GhostMetrics | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cookies | Yes (by default) | None | None |
| Consent banner | Usually required | Not required | Not required |
| Open-source | No | Yes (copyleft) | Tracker only |
| Self-host | No | Yes | No (hosted) |
| Reporting depth | Deepest (funnels, cohorts) | Essentials | Essentials + public dashboards |
| Raw data export | BigQuery (free) | CSV + API | CSV (Pro) |
| Real-time | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ad platform integration | Native (Google Ads) | No | No |
| Setup effort | Afternoon | One script tag | One script tag |
| Data location | Google infra | EU | US Cloudflare (EU on request) |
| Free tier | Free (standard) | Trial, then paid | Free forever (1 site) |
| Paid pricing | 360 = enterprise | By pageviews (see their site) | $9.99/mo flat |
Pricing and plan details for GA4 and Plausible change over time; verify current numbers on each vendor's own site. The GhostMetrics figures are current as of this page's update date.
There's no single winner here — there's a winner per situation. Find the row that sounds like you.
→ GA4, and it's not close. The native audience sync, conversion import and remarketing integration are the entire point of the tool, and no privacy-first product will (or wants to) replicate them. Run the consent banner, invest the afternoon, and use the depth.
→ Plausible. Open-source, EU-hosted, self-hostable. If a compliance requirement, a data-protection officer, or your own principles demand verifiability and full data ownership, this is the safe, honest answer — and we'll say that even though we compete with them.
→ GhostMetrics. Free forever for one site, unlimited pageviews, no consent banner, real-time from the first hit, and a public demo so you're not buying blind. This is the sweet spot we built for: solo sites, side projects, indie SaaS, and anyone who wants GA's "just show me what's working" without GA's cookie tax.
→ Run two at once. Keep GA4 for a month while a privacy-first tool builds a parallel record, then compare. Just remember: any cookie-based tool you keep still needs its banner.
If the "cookieless + no consent banner + free-to-start" column is the one you kept nodding at, start on the free plan and keep it as long as you like. Kick the tires on the public live demo first — it's the real dashboard on real traffic. And to be square with you: the dashboard is a hosted, closed-source product. If that's a dealbreaker, choose Plausible with our blessing.
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Disclosure: GhostMetrics is built by Null Agency, the publisher of this page. We've tried to keep the comparison fair — naming where GA4 (depth, integrations, free) and Plausible (open-source, self-host, EU residency) genuinely win — but you should treat our take on our own product with appropriate skepticism and verify current GA4 and Plausible pricing on their own sites. Nothing here is a paid placement.