Google Analytics (GA4) review

Events replaced sessions, and that is the whole problem

Google Analytics 4 replaced Universal Analytics and rebuilt the whole model around events rather than sessions and pageviews. That change is the source of most of the frustration people have with it. Reports that used to take one click now take an exploration. Metrics that used to mean one thing mean something adjacent. The learning curve is steep even for people who knew the old product well.

What you get in exchange is real. GA4 links to Google Ads and Search Console, models attribution across channels, builds audiences you can push straight into ad campaigns, handles web and mobile in one property, and exports raw events to BigQuery on the free tier. No free alternative on this list does even half of that.

Four reasons not to leave GA4 yet

• Anyone running Google Ads, where the integration is the entire point
• Teams that need web and app analytics in one property
• Organizations with a data team that will pipe events into BigQuery and query them properly
• High-volume sites that cannot justify paying for analytics

Nothing to pay, and no published price for Analytics 360

GA4 standard is free with no traffic charge. The limits are structural rather than commercial, and they are worth knowing before you assume free means unlimited. Verified against Google's own documentation on 20 July 2026: explorations sample above 10 million events per query (Analytics 360 raises this to 1 billion), data retention is set to either 2 or 14 months, and high-cardinality dimensions collapse into an "(other)" row above 500 unique values in a day, with a hard limit of 50,000 values.

You also get 25 event parameters per event, 25 user properties, 50 event-scoped custom dimensions, 30 key events, 100 audiences, 5 calculated metrics, and 200 explorations per user per property. The free BigQuery export is capped at 1 million events per day for the daily export, though streaming export is uncapped.

Analytics 360 exists for organizations that hit those walls. Google publishes no price for it on any of its own pages, so we will not repeat the figures that circulate elsewhere.

Complexity, sampling, and a 14-month limit on memory

• The GA4 interface is the single most common complaint in this category, and it is a fair one
• Fourteen months is a short memory for a business that wants year-over-year comparisons
• Sampling in explorations means the number you show a client may not be the number
• Consent mode, banners, and GDPR paperwork are a real ongoing cost that shows up as legal and engineering time rather than a subscription
• Your visitor data is Google's raw material. Whether that bothers you is a values question, not a technical one

Who should stay on GA4, and who quietly should not

GA4 is free and it is still the most capable analytics platform most people can get. If you run Google Ads, do not leave. If you have a data team pushing events into BigQuery, do not leave. The people who should leave are the ones who open GA4 four times a year to answer "how many people visited and where did they come from", pay for that with a consent banner and a privacy policy nobody reads, and could get a better answer from Umami in ten minutes. That is a very large group of people, and it is who this category is for.