Grain vs Google Analytics
GA4 is for teams who need free, ubiquitous traffic measurement wired into Google Ads. Grain is for teams who need to find — and fix — where the site is leaking revenue.
Free, universal, and deeply integrated with Google Ads and BigQuery. If your world is Google's ad stack and you have an analyst who already speaks GA4, it's the default for a reason.
EU-hosted, cookieless by default, with session replay, heatmaps, and an AI analyst that names the cause instead of handing you a sampled report to interpret yourself.
They overlap on: Web traffic, funnels, custom dashboards, event tracking, mobile analytics.
Feature matrix
What each tool ships today. No roadmap wishes.
When Google Analytics is the better choice
- You're already deep in Google Ads and need GA4 for attribution and audiences.
- Free matters more than compliance certainty, and your legal team is comfortable with the EU risk.
- You have an analyst who lives in GA4 and pipes raw events to BigQuery.
- You need the largest integration ecosystem in analytics.
- You don't need session replay or heatmaps.
When Grain is the better choice
- You need EU-hosted data processing without the GA4 legal cloud.
- You want cookieless tracking that survives consent-banner rejections.
- You need session replay and heatmaps GA4 will never ship.
- You want Kai to name the cause of a drop-off, not hand you a sampled table.
- You're on WordPress or WooCommerce and want native server-side tracking.
Run both, no commitment
Most teams keep GA4 for Google Ads attribution and run Grain for the behavior intelligence GA4 can't provide. The scripts coexist — run both and compare what each one shows you. Email eray@grainql.com for a 90-day Growth-tier trial.
FAQ
No, not in the next 12 months. Self-hosting is available on enterprise tier.
No. No cross-site tracking, no fingerprinting, no third-party cookies.
Yes. CSV from every view, plus the Grain Connector (in development).
Regulators in Austria, France, Italy, Denmark, Finland, and Norway have ruled or signaled that standard GA implementations violate GDPR by transferring data to the US. Grain is EU-hosted and cookieless by default, which sidesteps that whole category of risk.