Comparison
Google Analytics is free. It's also the most widely used web analytics platform on the planet, which means it's the default — not because it's the best tool for most websites, but because it costs nothing and everyone already knows where to find it.
GA4 — the current version — is a significant departure from Universal Analytics. It rebuilt the data model around events rather than sessions, overhauled the interface, and introduced a learning curve that most small teams and indie founders simply don't have time for. The reward for climbing that curve is a platform that was designed to serve Google's advertising ecosystem, not your business.
Palace was built for the people who want real answers without the complexity, the compliance risk, or the feeling that they're handing something over to Google every time a visitor lands on their site.
This is where the comparison starts, because it's the reason most people go looking for a Google Analytics alternative in the first place.
GA4 uses cookies, collects personal data, and routes that data through Google's US-based servers. It has been formally banned or declared illegal in Austria, France, Italy, Denmark, and other EU member states on the grounds that data transfers to US servers violate GDPR. If your audience is in Europe, using GA4 is a legal risk — not a theoretical one.
GA4 also requires a cookie consent banner. That banner costs you data — visitors who decline consent are invisible to GA4, which means your numbers are systematically undercounted and biased toward the subset of users who clicked accept.
Palace is cookieless by design. No consent banner required. No personal data collected. EU-hosted. GDPR-compliant without configuration. You see all your traffic, not just the fraction that consented.
GA4's learning curve is genuinely steep. The migration from Universal Analytics changed how almost everything was measured, reported, and interpreted. Sessions, users, and engagement rate all behave differently than they did before. The exploration reports are powerful but take real time to learn. Setting up conversion events requires navigating a configuration layer that wasn't designed for non-technical users.
Palace is designed to be immediately readable. Traffic sources, top pages, referrers, events, and campaign performance are on one screen. User journeys, funnels, and engagement scores don't require configuration beyond defining your conversion path. The script is under 1.5 KB — GA4's is around 70 KB, which adds meaningful page load overhead.
GA4 also introduces a 24–48 hour data processing delay for most reports, which means you can't see what's happening on your site right now. Palace shows real-time data.
GA4 has more raw reporting capability than Palace — it's a platform built by thousands of engineers over many years with enterprise-scale data infrastructure behind it. If you need audience segmentation, attribution modeling across long conversion paths, or deep integration with Google Ads, GA4 is purpose-built for that.
For the vast majority of websites — SaaS products, content sites, agencies, indie founders — those capabilities are overkill. What you actually need is: where did my visitors come from, what did they do, and did they convert? Palace answers all three without requiring a certification course.
On the features that matter most for growing websites, Palace goes further than GA4's free tier. Funnel tracking is available on Palace from day one — in GA4, it requires the GA360 enterprise tier at $50,000+/month. User journey mapping, engagement scoring, and a built-in UTM dashboard with link shortener are all Palace-only.
GA4 is also free — but it's free because your visitors' behavioral data is what funds Google's advertising business. Palace is free up to 100,000 events because we charge for usage above that. Different model, different incentives.
If you're running Google Ads at scale and need attribution data tied directly to your ad spend, GA4 is hard to replace — the integration is too deep. That's a specific use case, and it's a fair reason to stay.
For everything else — understanding your traffic, measuring your content, tracking campaigns, and seeing how people move through your product — Palace gives you better answers with less complexity, no compliance risk, and no cost to your visitors' privacy.
Palace is free to start. The script takes two minutes to install. You'll have data within the hour — and you'll actually be able to read it.
Set up takes minutes. Your first 100k events are free.
Simple, usage-based pricing from $0.00