Feasible vs Google Analytics

Google Analytics 4 is free. That part is true and it’s the only reason most people are still on it.

Here’s what the free costs, item by item. Every number below comes from Google’s own documentation or from a file you can download yourself, and every one is dated.

The script

We measured both on September 3, 2026, with gzip -9:

That’s about 43 times bigger. Reproduce it yourself:

curl -H 'Accept-Encoding: identity' <url> | gzip -9 | wc -c

And gtag.js is only the first request. It fetches more after it loads, so the real page cost is higher than the number above. On a phone on a bad connection, that’s the difference between a page that renders and a page that waits.

The consent banner

GA4 sets cookies and reads them back. In the EU and UK that’s the thing consent rules are about, which is why almost every European site running GA4 has a banner in front of it. Since 2024, Consent Mode v2 has been required for EEA advertisers using Google tags - Google’s own page says that without it “Google won’t be able to verify user consent choices and this may lead to loss in data.”

Feasible sets no cookie on your visitors, ever. It doesn’t fingerprint them either - the identifier is a SipHash of user agent, address and domain, keyed to a salt that changes every UTC day and is then unrecoverable. Nothing is stored that can be turned back into a person.

Most sites won’t need a consent banner for Feasible. That’s a design consequence, not a legal opinion, and the rules vary by country - the details and the caveats are on do I need a cookie banner. We’re not going to tell you you’re compliant. Ask your own lawyer if you’re somewhere strict.

Your history, on a 14-month clock

Google’s data retention page gives standard properties two options for event-level data: 2 months or 14 months. The 26-, 38- and 50-month options are marked “360 only.”

Read the scope carefully, because Google is precise about it: “The data retention setting does not affect standard aggregated reports… The data retention setting only affects explorations and funnel reports.” So your basic traffic charts survive. Explorations and funnels - the analysis you’d sit down to do - hit the wall.

Feasible keeps five years on the $99 plan, and you can export the raw events to CSV whenever you want.

Why reports disagree

GA4 withholds rows when the underlying counts are small. Google calls it data thresholding and states the position flatly:

“Data thresholds are system defined. You can’t adjust them.”

The remedy Google offers is to widen your date range. That’s it.

What that looks like in practice: a user on r/GoogleAnalytics found the same event over the same twelve months reading 1,519 in one report and 779 in another, with a third widget showing 1,519 again - “despite the widgets providing the exact same information.”

Sampling is the other half. Google’s sampling documentation puts the event-level query quota at “10 million events for standard Google Analytics properties and up to 1 billion events for Google Analytics 360 properties.” And the common belief that standard reports are never sampled isn’t what Google’s own reporting-surfaces table says - it lists sampling as possible for Reports, Insights and Explorations alike. Only the BigQuery export is marked as never sampled.

Feasible’s approach is the opposite of quiet. The health screen counts every event we dropped and gives each one a named reason - bot, datacenter address, a shield you set, a hostname you haven’t allowed yet - plus a warning if your proxy isn’t forwarding visitor addresses, and a button that sends a real test event through the public URL. Analytics that silently loses part of your traffic is worse than analytics that tells you.

Universal Analytics history

Universal Analytics stopped processing hits on July 1, 2023. A year later, Google’s sunset page says this about the week of July 1, 2024:

“You will not have access to any current or historical Universal Analytics data and most users will lose access to the interface and the API on this date.”

And on the same page, about exporting first: “your data will be permanently deleted by Google and won’t be recoverable.”

Anyone who didn’t export in time lost years of history. That’s not a hypothetical about vendor risk - it already happened, to a lot of people, at the largest analytics vendor there is.

The European rulings

You’ll see a lot of pages claiming Google Analytics is illegal in Europe. It isn’t, and that matters more than the cheap line.

What happened: between 2021 and 2023, a run of data protection authorities ruled that sending EU visitor data to Google in the US breached Chapter V of the GDPR. Austria’s DSB decided first, on December 22, 2021 (decision). France’s CNIL issued formal notices from February 10, 2022 (redacted decision). Italy’s Garante warned Caffeina Media on June 9, 2022 (doc-web 9782890). Sweden’s IMY went further and fined Tele2 SEK 12 million in June 2023, a fine the appeal court upheld in October 2025.

Then the ground moved. On July 10, 2023 the European Commission adopted the EU-US Data Privacy Framework adequacy decision. Google LLC is certified under it, which removes the specific transfer ground every one of those decisions rested on. The General Court dismissed a challenge to the framework in September 2025; an appeal is pending at the Court of Justice and undecided.

So: the rulings happened, they’re worth knowing about, and they aren’t a live prohibition today. What’s also true is that the framework’s two predecessors were both struck down, and a tool that doesn’t send data to an advertising company has no exposure to any of it either way.

Side by side

Where Google Analytics is better

It’s free, and free is a real feature.

It’s wired into Google’s ad stack. If you buy Google Ads, GA4 conversions feed back into bidding, Search Ads 360 and Display & Video 360 in a way nothing else can replicate. If you spend meaningful money on Google traffic, GA4 is part of your ad tooling, not just your reporting.

BigQuery export gives you every raw event, unsampled, for free, and lets you join web behavior to your own warehouse. That’s more than we offer.

It has cohort and retention analysis, mobile SDKs, audience building and cross-device modeling. We have none of those, and no plans we’re announcing. Search Console is properly integrated in GA4 with a real keyword report. We don’t have one, and there’s nothing in Feasible that answers “which queries brought people here”.

And every agency and consultant already knows it. GA4 experience is common. Hiring for ours is a five-minute conversation, but there’s no ecosystem behind it.

Which one to pick

We’re not claiming GA4 is missing data because of ad blockers. Blocking rates vary enormously - under 10% on a mainstream consumer audience, far higher on a developer one - and the widely quoted 58% figure came from one vendor’s study on a single page that trended on Hacker News. We’re not going to build an argument on it, and neither should you.

The claim is narrower and easier to check. GA4 asks you to load 148 KB, show a banner, accept a 14-month wall on the analysis you care about, live with rows you can’t see and can’t unhide, and send your visitors’ behavior to a company whose business is advertising. Feasible asks for 3,377 bytes and $99 a year.

If you’re moving, export your GA4 reports as CSV and upload the folder - your history comes with you. See moving off Google Analytics. The feature list is the inventory of what you’d get, including what’s missing.