Web Analytics · Comparison
Google Analytics vs. Pirsch Analytics
Google Analytics and Pirsch Analytics compared across Company facts, Pricing, Analytics capabilities, Privacy & compliance, Data ownership & deployment and Platform & integrations — every fact sourced and re-verified from each vendor's public material.
Google Analytics
Free web and app analytics platform by Google with audience and conversion insights.
Pirsch Analytics
Server-side, cookieless web analytics hosted in Germany, built for GDPR compliance.
Company facts
Headquarters
Mountain View, CA Google's main campus (Googleplex) is in Mountain View, CA. GA4 is a Google product.
Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Germany Emvi Software GmbH registered at Nickelstraße 1b, 33378 Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Germany.
Employees
190.8k Alphabet/Google had ~190,820 full-time employees at year-end 2025 per company reporting.
2 Pirsch is a two-person team: Marvin Blum (backend/infra) and Daniel Schramm (design/UX).
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
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$6 Standard plan starts at $6/month for 10,000 monthly pageviews (as of June 2026).
Offers Free Tier
GA4 standard is entirely free to use with no time limit. Google Analytics 360 is the paid enterprise tier.
No perpetual free plan; only a 30-day free trial is offered.
Free Trial Length (Days)
0 days No free trial needed — GA4 standard is permanently free. No paid plan exists at entry level.
30 days 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
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10k Standard entry plan includes 10,000 monthly pageviews at $6/month.
Entry Plan Website Limit
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50 sites Standard entry plan covers up to 50 websites.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Realtime report shows active users in last 5 and 30 minutes, events, sources, and pages as they happen.
Live visitor count and real-time visitor map are core dashboard features.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via gtag('event', '<name>', {params}) or Google Tag Manager on any plan.
User-defined custom events supported via JS snippet or server-side API.
Goal / Conversion Tracking
Any event can be marked as a key event (conversion); GA4 reports key-event counts and rates by source, medium, and campaign.
Conversion goals can be defined against events or pageviews with conversion rate reporting.
Funnels
Funnel Exploration (in Explore) supports up to 10 steps with per-step drop-off rates, open and closed funnel modes.
Multi-step funnel analysis (up to 8 steps) is available on the Plus plan.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
Native ecommerce reporting includes revenue by transaction, purchase journey, checkout journey, and monetization overview.
Revenue tracked via custom events with monetary metadata; Shopify integration available.
Heatmaps
GA4 has no built-in click/scroll heatmap feature. Heatmaps require a separate third-party tool (e.g. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity).
Heatmaps are not offered; a feature request exists on the forum but is unimplemented.
Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
GA4 uses first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_<id>) by default. Cookieless operation is not a supported mode.
Cookieless by design; uses a daily-rotating fingerprint hash with no browser cookies.
Consent Banner Required
GA4 sets cookies and processes personal data; GDPR/ePrivacy require a consent banner for EU users.
Pirsch explicitly states no cookie consent banner is needed for its analytics.
GDPR Compliant
Google states it operates as a GDPR data processor for GA4, with Data Processing Terms, ISO 27001, and consent tooling.
Vendor claims GDPR, CCPA, PECR, and Schrems II compliance.
EU Data Residency
EU traffic is initially collected on EU servers but is then forwarded to Google Analytics processing servers globally; data is not stored exclusively in the EU.
All analytics data stored on Hetzner servers in Falkenstein, Germany.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GA4 is a proprietary cloud service. No source code is publicly available.
Core analytics library is open source (AGPLv3) on GitHub.
License
proprietary GA4 is a closed-source cloud product. API client libraries are Apache 2.0 but the platform is proprietary.
AGPLv3 Core analytics library (pirsch-analytics/pirsch) is licensed under AGPLv3.
Self-Hostable
GA4 is cloud-only with no self-hosting option. All data is sent to Google's servers.
Self-hosting available via Enterprise License for on-premise deployment.
Data Retention (Months)
14 mo Free GA4 properties can choose 2 or 14 months retention for user/event-level data; 14 months is the maximum on the free tier.
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Unlimited Data Retention
Free GA4 caps retention at 14 months for user/event-level data. No unlimited/forever retention option on any GA4 tier.
Both Standard and Plus plans include unlimited data retention.
Google Analytics Import
GA4 cannot import historical Universal Analytics analytics data. Data Import covers external business data (cost, item, user, offline events) only — not migrating legacy GA report history.
Official import from Google Analytics (UA and GA4) is documented with step-by-step guide.
Raw Data Export
Raw event-level data exportable to BigQuery (free sandbox available); daily and streaming export modes. Data API also available.
Stats API enables full programmatic data retrieval; CSV export and raw exports on request also available.
Platform & integrations
Has API
GA4 Data API (v1) enables programmatic querying of analytics data with runReport, runRealtimeReport, and more.
RESTful Stats API with no rate limit on statistics endpoints.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
135.7 KB gtag.js baseline payload; varies with property configuration.
3.5 KB Measured compressed transfer size.
Official WordPress Plugin
Site Kit by Google is an official Google-published WordPress plugin that includes GA4 integration.
Official WordPress plugin published by Emvi Software GmbH on wordpress.org.
Email Reports
GA4 admins can schedule up to 50 reports for email delivery (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) in PDF or CSV format.
Scheduled weekly and monthly email summary reports are supported.
Public Dashboard Sharing
GA4 reports cannot be shared publicly without a Google account. Share links require recipients to have GA property access.
Dashboards can be made public or shared via private access links without requiring viewer accounts.
The verdict
Google Analytics Best for free, deep ecommerce and funnel analysis
Permanently free with no pageview cap, versus Pirsch's $6/month and no free tier. Native ecommerce and revenue reporting, 10-step funnels (Pirsch tops out at 8), and raw event export to BigQuery make it the deeper free option for conversion and revenue work.
Full profile Pirsch Analytics Best for cookieless, EU-hosted privacy compliance
Cookieless by design with no consent banner required, where GA4 sets cookies and needs one. Data stays on German servers (GA forwards globally), retention is unlimited (GA caps at 14 months), and it is open-source and self-hostable. A 3.5 KB script beats GA's 135.7 KB.
Full profileSources · 42 verified references
about.google pirsch.io macrotrends.net marketingplatform.google.com support.google.com developers.google.com + 5 more
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