Comparison

Metricward and Google Analytics

Written for somebody who already runs GA4 and is deciding whether to move. That includes the parts where GA4 is the better answer.

Keep Google Analytics if

Your business runs on Google Ads and you need conversions flowing back into it.
You need BigQuery export and already have a warehouse team using it.
Your agency reports in GA4 and retraining them costs more than the problem.
You have no privacy pressure and no budget, and free wins.

Plenty of people should keep GA4 and run Metricward alongside it. Two tools answering different questions is a normal setup, and we would rather say so than sell you a migration you regret.

Move if

Legal, a DPO or an enterprise security review has asked where visitor data goes.
Your consent banner is eating 40 to 70 percent of your traffic and every report is a biased sample.
You want funnels and retention without paying product-analytics prices.
You are tired of thresholded, sampled and modelled numbers you cannot audit.
You want a renamed property to show up as a flagged event in a debugger, rather than as a flat chart somebody notices a month later.

What actually differs

Topic	Google Analytics 4	Metricward
Where data lives	United States, under US jurisdiction	Sweden, backups encrypted in Sweden
Company control	US advertising company	EU company, no advertising business
IP addresses	Collected, then anonymised after processing	Never written to disk at all
Cookies	Required for most functionality	None by default
Sampling	Applied on large or complex queries	Never
Modelled data	Gaps filled with modelled conversions	Never presented as measured
Funnels	Available, awkward to build	First class, with drop-off in people and not only percentages
Retention	Limited	Cohort grids, with blank cells for periods that have not happened yet
Bot filtering	Opaque	Labelled and inspectable, excluded from reports, never billed
When tracking breaks	You find out from a strange chart	The tracking plan flags the event and the debugger names the mismatch
Getting your data out	BigQuery export, or a CSV per report	CSV of every traffic, customer and revenue report, and of the raw events, on every plan
Price	Free	Free to 169 euros depending on volume
Ads integration	Deep and native	None, and not planned

Your numbers will change. Here is why

Traffic usually goes up, often by 10 to 40 percent.

A consent-gated GA4 property only counts visitors who accepted. In cookieless mode there is nothing to accept, so more of your real traffic gets counted.

Sessions may go down.

We end a session when a new campaign arrives as well as after 30 minutes of inactivity, because crediting the second campaign’s conversion to the first campaign’s session makes attribution quietly wrong.

Bot traffic disappears from your reports.

It is still recorded and labelled so you can inspect what was filtered, but it is excluded from every report and it is never billed.

Nothing is sampled or modelled.

No thresholds hide your smallest segments, and no gap-filling invents visitors who were never measured. What you see is what arrived.

Run both for a month before switching anything off. Any vendor telling you their numbers will match another vendor’s is either not paying attention or hoping you are not.

And Plausible?

Plausible is a good product with a real EU privacy story. If all you need is traffic, sources and goals, it will serve you well and cost you less thought. We are not going to pretend otherwise.

The difference shows up the moment you ask a product question: which step of your signup loses people, whether last month’s cohort came back, how mobile Safari differs from everyone else, or whether the property somebody renamed last Tuesday quietly broke a report. Those are the questions Metricward is built around, and they are why it carries a full event store rather than a set of counters.

Try it on your own traffic

Free on 10,000 events a month. Install it alongside whatever you run now and compare for yourself.

Start free