Plausible vs Google Analytics

We installed each tool alone on a test page and opened it in Chrome four ways: as a person who moves the mouse and scrolls, and as three kinds of bot. One announces it's automated. One hides that. One clicks without moving the mouse, the way AI agents click. No data reached Plausible or Google: apart from fetching each script, our lab answered every request itself.

Notice the cookie row. GA4 left _ga and _ga_<property> in the browser for 400 days, which is Chrome's limit; Google asks for two years. Plausible and Nora left nothing, in cookies or anywhere else.

Now the bot rows. Plausible's script checks whether the browser says it's automated and sends nothing if it does. That caught the bot that announced itself. Once the same browser hid it, Plausible counted it like anyone else, and so did GA4. GA4 sent a page view for every visitor; Google filters known bots later, on its own servers, and never says how many.

Ad blockers block both scripts outright. EasyPrivacy, the list most of them use, names plausible.io and Google's tag. Nora isn't on it.

Our read: Plausible's quiet treatment of announced bots is a sensible default that GA4 doesn't have. Neither tool can tell an AI agent from a person, and that's the part of the traffic growing fastest.

Plausible counts page views plus custom events, added up across all your sites. Its three plans share the same steps and differ in what you get. Starter covers one site. Growth ($14 at 10k, $29 at 100k, $104 at 1M) covers three sites and three people. Business ($19, $39, $139) covers ten sites and adds funnels, revenue, custom properties and the Stats API. Paying for a year costs ten months.

Go over your limit two months running and Plausible asks you to upgrade. The dashboard locks a week later, but it keeps collecting (plans).

If you'd rather run it yourself, the Community Edition is free. It comes out twice a year, with community support only, and leaves out funnels, revenue goals and journeys. It also filters bots by name and referral spam only. One person who self-hosts it watched bot visits climb from about 200 to over 5,000 a day (Loopwerk).

GA4 is free with no monthly cap; its paid edition is sold through Google's sales team, and outside estimates start it near $50,000 a year. Nora is free up to 1 million visitors a month. Note that Nora counts visitors, not page views.

Run both and Plausible will almost always show more. Four things cause most of the gap.

• Consent. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, GA4 needs consent for its cookies. People who decline aren't counted, or are only estimated: Google models them once a site has 1,000 declined events a day for a week and 1,000 consenting users a day. Most small sites never get there. In one study, GA missed 55.6% of visits when a banner was shown, and 15.8% when none was (Orbit Media).
• Blocking. Ad blockers stop both, but browsers' own tracking protection goes after Google's tag more often. In Plausible's own study, 58% of a technical audience blocked GA (Plausible).
• What counts as a visitor. Plausible counts a person once a day. GA4 counts a user per cookie, for up to 400 days. Over a month, a regular reader is many Plausible visitors and one GA4 user.
• Bots. Each tool drops different bots, and neither tells you how many. On the first site running Nora, 3.3% of the page views its script saw over nine days in October 2026 were bots or AI agents.

Google Analytics 4 drops known bots using Google's research and the IAB spiders and bots list. You can't turn the filter off, and you never see how much it removed (Google). Since 13 May 2026, an AI Assistant channel groups visits referred by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and others, going by the referrer (Google). Nothing in GA4 labels AI agents. Visits from ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity Comet show up as ordinary Chrome, often as Direct (MarTech).

Plausible filters bot names, referral spam, about 40,800 data-centre address ranges and its own patterns, and says it blocks about 4 billion bot visits a month across its customers (Plausible). Some VPN and iCloud Private Relay traffic gets filtered along with them. Its AI Assistants channel arrived in June 2026, and it filters known AI crawlers (Plausible). It doesn't label agents that browse in a real browser.

Nora keeps every page view and labels it: a person, an AI agent or a bot, with the test that caught it. In our lab it caught the bot that announced itself and the agent-style click. The disguised bot that never touched the page passed as a person, as it did in every tool.

None of the three sees crawlers like GPTBot or ClaudeBot, which fetch pages without running scripts. That takes your server or CDN logs.

Where GA4 is ahead

• Google Ads. Import conversions, build audiences, report spend against results.
• Explorations. Free-form funnels, paths and segments over raw events.
• Raw data. A free daily export to BigQuery, up to 1 million events a day (Google).
• People across days, and demographics, though small reports are hidden by thresholds.

Where Plausible is ahead

• One page. You can read the whole dashboard in a minute.
• No cookies, nothing stored, and data on EU-owned servers.
• Nothing hidden. No rows held back by privacy thresholds, and data kept 3 to 5 years. GA4 keeps the event-level data behind its explorations 2 or 14 months (Google).
• Open source, with a version you can run yourself.
• Extras on every plan: Search Console keywords, email reports and public dashboards.

From each maker's pages on 13 October 2026. Plausible's funnels, revenue and custom properties need the Business plan.

We read reviews and threads from the past two years. The same few things come up again and again. Here they are, in our words, with links to where people said them.

1. Run both for two to four weeks. Compare Monday with Monday; weekends and campaigns move the totals.
2. Bring your history. Plausible imports GA4's history into its dashboard (import guide).
3. Rebuild your goals as page or event goals. Funnels and revenue need the Business plan.
4. Keep Google's tag for Ads if you buy Google Ads and rely on its conversions. Plausible doesn't feed Google's bidding.
5. Connect Search Console in Plausible to keep seeing your search queries.
6. Remove GA4, then check whether your cookie banner still has anything to ask about.

Nora is for you if you like Plausible's simplicity but not the bill, and you want to know how much of your traffic is people. It's free up to 1 million visitors a month, sets no cookies, weighs 2.7 KB, and labels every page view person, AI agent or bot, with the test that caught it. You also get live visitors, pages, sources (AI assistants among them), countries, goals, a weekly email and CSV export.

It gives up things the others have. There are no funnels, you can't host it yourself, it isn't open source, your data is in the US, and it can't import your GA history. It launches on 1 November 2026, so it has no track record yet. If any of that matters to you, Plausible is the better pick.

Nora Lab, the research team at Nora Analytics, ran every test on this page the same way for each tool. Here is exactly how, so you can judge the results yourself.

The full method, with what each visitor stands for, is on How we test. Every result from the lab run is public as JSON.