Web Analytics · Comparison
Google Analytics vs. Seline
Google Analytics and Seline 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.
Seline
Simple, cookieless, privacy-first website and product analytics built in the EU.
Company facts
Headquarters
Mountain View, CA Google's main campus (Googleplex) is in Mountain View, CA. GA4 is a Google product.
Warsaw, Poland Registered address: ul. Łowicka 60/16, 02-531 Warsaw, Poland.
Employees
190.8k Alphabet/Google had ~190,820 full-time employees at year-end 2025 per company reporting.
4 Tiny bootstrapped team of approximately 4 people. Co-founded by Kostya Nesterovich and Misha Slizenko.
Pricing
Starting Monthly Price (USD)
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$14 Single 'Pro' plan at $14/month (monthly billing). Annual billing available with 2 months free.
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. Seline states: 'No, we don't have a free plan. We're a small bootstrapped team operating exclusively through subscriber fees.'
Free Trial Length (Days)
0 days No free trial needed — GA4 standard is permanently free. No paid plan exists at entry level.
7 days 7-day free trial on the Pro plan, no credit card required.
Entry Plan Pageview Limit (Monthly)
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100k Pro plan includes 100,000 events per month. Seline meters 'events' (pageviews + custom events combined), not pageviews alone.
Entry Plan Website Limit
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1 sites Pricing is per project (one website/domain per subscription); linking additional projects requires their own Pro subscription, with the option to share an event limit.
Analytics capabilities
Real-Time Dashboard
Realtime report shows active users in last 5 and 30 minutes, events, sources, and pages as they happen.
Live globe view and real-time visitor activity dashboard included.
Custom Event Tracking
Custom events tracked via gtag('event', '<name>', {params}) or Google Tag Manager on any plan.
Custom events tracked via seline.track() JS method or data-sln-event HTML attributes. Custom properties supported.
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 via multi-step funnels (step drop-off / conversion rate) and revenue-attributed custom events.
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 built into the product for all plan users.
Ecommerce / Revenue Tracking
Native ecommerce reporting includes revenue by transaction, purchase journey, checkout journey, and monetization overview.
Revenue attribution by traffic source, referrer, and UTM. Native integrations with Stripe, Shopify, and Polar. MRR tracking included.
Heatmaps
GA4 has no built-in click/scroll heatmap feature. Heatmaps require a separate third-party tool (e.g. Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity).
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Privacy & compliance
Cookieless Tracking
GA4 uses first-party cookies (_ga, _ga_<id>) by default. Cookieless operation is not a supported mode.
Cookie-free by design. Uses daily-rotated non-reversible hashing of IP+browser+device — no cookies or persistent browser storage.
Consent Banner Required
GA4 sets cookies and processes personal data; GDPR/ePrivacy require a consent banner for EU users.
No cookie/consent banner needed. Seline explicitly states GDPR compliance without requiring visitor consent banners.
GDPR Compliant
Google states it operates as a GDPR data processor for GA4, with Data Processing Terms, ISO 27001, and consent tooling.
Vendor explicitly claims GDPR compliance. No personal data retained; EU-hosted infrastructure.
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 infrastructure hosted in Germany (EU) via Hetzner — app servers, ClickHouse, and Postgres databases.
Data ownership & deployment
Open Source
GA4 is a proprietary cloud service. No source code is publicly available.
The main SaaS product is proprietary. Only the JavaScript tracker client (seline-js) is MIT-licensed open source on GitHub.
License
proprietary GA4 is a closed-source cloud product. API client libraries are Apache 2.0 but the platform is proprietary.
proprietary Main analytics platform is proprietary SaaS. The JS tracker client is separately MIT-licensed.
Self-Hostable
GA4 is cloud-only with no self-hosting option. All data is sent to Google's servers.
Cloud-only SaaS. No self-hosting or on-premises option is documented or advertised.
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.
Pro plan retains data forever ('unlimited' retention). Free trial and any hypothetical lower tiers cap at 1 year.
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.
No official Google Analytics (UA/GA4) historical-data import; tracking starts from install.
Raw Data Export
Raw event-level data exportable to BigQuery (free sandbox available); daily and streaming export modes. Data API also available.
Public API includes a Raw Events endpoint for exporting individual event records with full filtering, pagination, and ordering. CSV export also available via AI assistant.
Platform & integrations
Has API
GA4 Data API (v1) enables programmatic querying of analytics data with runReport, runRealtimeReport, and more.
Public Stats API available at seline.com/api — covers visit metrics, custom events, funnels, visitor profiles, revenue data, and raw events.
Tracking Script Size (KB)
135.7 KB gtag.js baseline payload; varies with property configuration.
4.2 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 at wordpress.org/plugins/seline-analytics by the Seline founder (nstkostya = Kostya Nesterovich).
Email Reports
GA4 admins can schedule up to 50 reports for email delivery (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) in PDF or CSV format.
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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 shared via a public link (e.g. app.seline.com/share/<site>) viewable without an account.
The verdict
Google Analytics Best for free, no-cost analytics with deep funnels
Google Analytics is free with no time limit, while Seline starts at $14/month with no free tier. It adds raw event export to BigQuery and native ecommerce revenue reporting. The trade-offs: it sets cookies, requires a consent banner, holds no EU data residency, and caps retention at 14 months.
Full profile Seline Best for cookieless, EU-resident privacy-first tracking
Seline is cookieless and needs no consent banner, hosts all data in the EU (Germany), and retains it indefinitely — none of which GA4 offers. Its script is 4.2 KB versus GA4's 135.7 KB, and dashboards share via a public link. The cost: $14/month with only a 7-day trial and no free plan.
Full profileSources · 37 verified references
about.google seline.com macrotrends.net starterstory.com capterra.com marketingplatform.google.com + 7 more
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