TrackWhy vs GA4
Free and ubiquitous — but complex, sampled and consent-bound.
Google Analytics 4 is the default analytics tool on the web, and for good reason: it is free at almost any traffic level, it ties into Google Ads and BigQuery, and practically every marketer has used it at some point. If you live inside the Google advertising stack, GA4 is hard to walk away from entirely.
But GA4 traded the clarity of Universal Analytics for an event-and-parameter model that most teams never fully learn. Reports get sampled once you cross Google’s thresholds, the data-retention default is just two to fourteen months, and the whole thing relies on cookies — so in the EU you need a consent banner, and the visitors who decline simply vanish from your numbers. The "bounce rate" you do see is derived from an engagement heuristic that often reports a misleading 0%.
TrackWhy takes the opposite stance: one cookieless 1.7 KB script, no banner, no sampling, five years of retention, and a dashboard where you can actually drill into every breakdown instead of staring at the top ten. You give up GA4’s native Google Ads coupling; you get analytics you can read and trust.
Side by side
An honest comparison — GA4 has real strengths, and we say so. Here is where each tool lands.
| Feature | TrackWhy | GA4 |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie consent banner | Not needed — cookieless by default | Required in the EU; declining visitors disappear |
| Data sampling | Never — every query hits raw events | Reports sampled past Google’s thresholds |
| Time to first insight | Readable dashboard out of the box | Steep learning curve; events + parameters to model |
| Drill-down past rank 10 | Search, sort, paginate any breakdown | Possible via explorations, but slow and fiddly |
| Bounce rate | Share of single-pageview sessions, computed right | Engagement-derived; often a misleading 0% |
| Funnels & retention | Built in from one typed filter algebra | In GA4 Explore, with sampling and a learning curve |
| Revenue attribution | Native Stripe revenue attribution | Ecommerce events you instrument yourself |
| AI insights | Grounded in your real numbers, never invented | Automated "insights" are limited and opaque |
| Data retention | 5 years | 2–14 months by default |
| Data ownership / privacy | No cross-site IDs, no PII, EU-friendly | Data flows into Google’s ad ecosystem |
| Script weight | 1.7 KB | gtag.js is ~50× heavier |
| Price | One flat plan, everything included | Free — paid for with your data and your time |
Why teams switch
GA4 needs consent in the EU, and every visitor who clicks "reject" is missing from your reports. TrackWhy is cookieless, so you count everyone — legally — and your traffic numbers stop lying to you.
GA4 can do depth, but only through Explorations that sample and frustrate. TrackWhy lets you search, sort and paginate every breakdown and click any row to filter the whole dashboard — in seconds, not exploration tabs.
No event-and-parameter modelling project, no sampling caveats. A dashboard a founder or marketer can open and understand on day one, with AI narration grounded in the real figures.
Connect Stripe once and see which pages, sources and campaigns actually drive revenue — without hand-instrumenting ecommerce events the way GA4 demands.
Switching is quick
FAQ