Google Analytics is free at any volume. The bill arrives in another currency

Google Analytics scores 72, inside our Strong band, while sitting ninth of nine on rank in this category. That is one of the deliberate divergences on this site and we are not tuning either number, because they answer different questions and the difference is informative.

Generosity scores 88 and feature depth 86, both near the top of this file. Nothing free in this category matches GA4 for attribution, audience building, web and app in one property, or raw event export to BigQuery. It is on our list for its complexity and its privacy position, not its price, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Freedom scores 34, the lowest here by a distance, and that single pillar is what its rank is really about. The tool is free. What it is not is yours.

The limits are structural rather than commercial, and they surprise people precisely because there is no bill to warn them (as of July 2026):

• Data retention is 2 or 14 months for user-level and event-level data. Fourteen months is a short memory for a business that wants year-over-year comparisons.
• Explorations sample above 10 million events per query. The number you show a client may not be the number. Analytics 360 raises the threshold to 1 billion.
• High-cardinality dimensions collapse into an "(other)" row above 500 unique values in a day, with a hard limit of 50,000.
• Structural caps on the model itself: 50 event-scoped custom dimensions, 30 key events, 100 audiences, 25 event parameters per event, 25 user properties, 5 calculated metrics, 200 explorations per user per property.
• BigQuery daily export is capped at 1 million events a day, though streaming export is uncapped.

Then the costs that never appear as limits at all. GA4 uses cookies, so your consent banner and your GDPR paperwork stay, and configuring it defensibly takes ongoing work. There is no self-hosting and no version of this you can run yourself. Your visitor data is Google's raw material, which is a values question rather than a technical one.

The GA4 interface is the other tax, and it is the most common complaint in this category. Reports that used to take one click now take an exploration build.

There is no ladder here in the normal sense. Standard GA4 is free with no traffic charge and no feature you unlock by paying, and the only thing above it is Analytics 360, which raises the sampling threshold to 1 billion events per query, extends retention to as much as 50 months, and adds SLAs and support.

We are not quoting a price for it. Google publishes no figure on any of its own pages, only a "Talk to Sales" link, and our sourcing rule is that a number has to be verifiable first-party or it does not appear. Figures circulate elsewhere and we are not repeating them. Treat 360 as an enterprise procurement conversation rather than a plan you can buy.

Which leaves an unusual situation for this category: the upgrade path is not money at all for the vast majority of readers. If 14-month retention is your problem, the answer is BigQuery export rather than a bigger plan, and that export is on the free tier. If the interface is your problem, no amount of money fixes it and the answer is a different tool.

The genuine cost of GA4 is a consent banner, a privacy policy and the engineering time to keep both defensible. Price that before you conclude it is free.

Yes. GA4 standard is free at any traffic volume with the deepest free feature set in this category, no card, no cap and no upgrade wall, so on the narrow question this page asks the answer is unambiguous. We are landing a band above where a 72 usually sits for exactly that reason, and the low freedom pillar underneath it is measuring what you hand over rather than what you pay.

Who should stay: anyone running Google Ads, where the integration is the entire point; teams needing web and app analytics in one property; organisations with a data team piping events into BigQuery and querying them properly. Nothing free on this list replaces any of that.

Who should leave: the people who open GA4 four times a year to answer how many people visited and where they came from, and who pay for that answer with a consent banner, a privacy policy nobody reads and an interface that turns a two-click question into an exploration build. That is a very large group, and it is who this category exists for.

If it describes you, Umami's free plan answers the same question in ten minutes with no cookies, free Google Analytics alternatives ranks the options, and the best free analytics tools covers the category.