Galytics vs Google Analytics

Most people reading this already have Google Analytics installed and are wondering whether leaving is worth the trouble. Two things are true at once: GA4 is an enormously capable product, and it is the single biggest reason your site needs a cookie banner.

The cookies exist to serve ads as well as measure

This is not our characterisation. It is Google's, in their own developer documentation:

Remarketing and Google Analytics both use cookies to help do things like run your ads or measure your success.

Google's cookie reference lists _ga with a two year expiry and _gid with 24 hours, both labelled Analytics. A two year identifier on every visitor is why the banner exists, and why you have to gate the script behind it in the EU. Everyone who declines is missing from your numbers.

Galytics sets no cookies at all. Nothing to declare, nothing to gate, nobody missing.

Your visitors' data goes to Google

Not to a processor you chose. To the company whose revenue is advertising, which also operates the search engine you are trying to rank in and the ad platform you are trying to buy from. Several EU data protection authorities have had a great deal to say about that over the last few years, and the arrangements have changed more than once.

Galytics is hosted in the EU and sells nothing but analytics. There is no second business for your visitor data to be useful to.

GA4 is a large product and you are using a fraction of it

Explorations, audiences, attribution models, BigQuery export, consent mode, custom dimensions. If you need that depth, GA4 is genuinely good at it and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Most sites do not. Most sites want to know how many people came, where from, which pages they read, and whether they did the thing. That is the whole of our dashboard, it loads without a data engineering conversation, and it is the same on every plan.

Neither of them shows you the session

Google Analytics has no session replay. Nor does it have heatmaps. So the usual GA4 stack is GA4 plus a recorder, which means a second vendor and a second script.

Galytics is the analytics and the replay in one cookieless script.

Side by side

When Google Analytics is the better call

If you spend seriously on Google Ads and need the tightest possible attribution loop, if you want BigQuery export, or if free matters more than the banner, stay where you are. We would rather say that than pretend a paid product beats a free one on every axis.

Galytics is the better call when you want the banner gone, the data in the EU, the replay included, and a dashboard your colleagues can read without training.

Sources

• Google Analytics and remarketing cookies, for the stated purpose
• Google advertising and measurement cookie reference, for _ga and _gid expiries

Checked August 2026. If any of this has changed, tell us and we will correct the page.