| Overview |
Google's mainstream analytics platform for web and app measurement, built around GA4 events, attribution, advertising integrations, and BigQuery-connected reporting for larger deployments. | An open-source, privacy-first web analytics platform available as a hosted cloud service or self-hosted AGPL-3.0 software, with cookieless traffic reporting, realtime data, funnels, visitor journeys, retention, revenue attribution, Web Vitals, exports, AI analysis, and MCP access. |
| Pricing |
GA4 standard is free; Google Analytics 360 is enterprise-priced via Google sales | AGPL-3.0 self-hosting has no license fee. Hosted monthly plans: Starter $9 for 50,000 events and 1 site; Growth $19 for 500,000 events and 5 sites; Pro $49 for 5 million events and 10 sites. No hosted free plan. |
| Deployment |
Vendor-hosted cloud | Self-hosted and hosted options |
| Best for |
All website owners, from small businesses to enterprises | Privacy-focused product, marketing, and development teams that want open web analytics with revenue attribution and AI-agent access |
| Operator |
Google LLC
Subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. | AGHAZADA LLC
Independent private company |
| Company base |
Mountain View, United States · United States | New Mexico, United States · United States |
| Organization scale |
190,820 employees · parent company, as of 31 Dec 2025 | No comparable official organization-size figure was publicly disclosed. |
| Recent direction |
marketing attribution
Recent official evidence shows a focus on marketing attribution. | marketing attribution
Recent official evidence shows a focus on marketing attribution. |
| Key features |
- Web and app event analytics
- Real-time reports
- E-commerce measurement
- Advertising attribution
- Audience building
- Explorations and funnels
- BigQuery export
- Google Ads integration
|
- Cookieless web analytics
- Hosted cloud or AGPL self-hosting
- Realtime dashboard and live globe
- Custom events and funnels
- Visitor journeys and retention
- Stripe revenue attribution
- Campaign and UTM reporting
- Core Web Vitals
- Public dashboards and embeds
- Data import and export
- AI assistant, MCP server, and CLI
|
| Important considerations |
GA4 has a steep reporting and consent-configuration learning curve; Analytics 360 pricing is not public and standard properties have lower limits. | The hosted service has no free plan. Self-hosting needs Linux, Docker, four DNS records, about 4 GB of RAM, and 25 GB of disk; published images are amd64. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control traffic is intentionally not recorded. |
| Integrations |
Google Ads, BigQuery, Shopify | Stripe, Plausible, Fathom |
| Fact check |
We checked this information against official vendor sources on 2026-08-08. |
We checked this information against official vendor sources on 2026-08-27. |