GA4 is harder to use than its predecessor, sends your visitor data into Google's advertising profile, requires a consent banner in the EU and is blocked outright by a growing share of the people you most want to reach. Here is what that actually costs you - and what a privacy-first alternative looks like.
Six things GA4 quietly does that nobody enjoys.
GA4 sets advertising-grade cookies and ships visitor identifiers to Google's ad infrastructure. Under the GDPR and the EU ePrivacy directive that means you need explicit prior consent. Cue the modal that nobody reads - Advance Metrics' cookie behaviour study found that about a third of visitors ignore the banner completely, and roughly 69% end up withholding consent one way or another.
GA4 servers are in the US. After Schrems II several EU data protection authorities (FR CNIL, AT DSB, IT Garante, DK Datatilsynet) have already issued findings that using GA in the standard configuration is not compliant. The Data Privacy Framework helps - until the next court ruling does not.
The very act of loading the GA script lets Google associate the pageview with their advertising graph for that visitor across the rest of the web. You are not the only one collecting analytics on your visitors - you are just one of the contributors.
uBlock Origin, Brave, Firefox strict mode, Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention, NextDNS, Pi-hole and a long tail of corporate firewalls all block google-analytics.com. How much you lose depends on your audience: Plausible measured under 10% of visitors blocking GA on lifestyle sites, over 25% on tech-focused sites and 58% among Hacker News and Reddit readers - and GWI data puts global ad-blocker usage at roughly 30% of internet users. Your dashboard is missing the most privacy-aware (and often most valuable) slice of your visitors.
On busy sites GA4 silently samples your data, then asks you to upgrade to GA360 (starting at five figures a year) if you want unsampled numbers. The dashboard never tells you which numbers are estimates and which are exact.
Even Google's biggest customers complain that GA4 is harder to use than Universal Analytics: events without sessions, missing reports, conversion math nobody can reproduce, and an "explore" tool that needs a part-time job to learn. The migration was forced; the productivity loss was not optional.
Same fundamental job - count visits, source them, surface conversions - none of the tradeoffs above.
All data lives in the EU under the GDPR and the BDSG. No transatlantic transfer, no Schrems III to lose sleep over.
A single first-party _cc_vid identifier for returning-visitor counting. Nothing third-party, nothing shared with an ad network.
We have no advertising business. The visitor data we receive is used to render your dashboard and nothing else - cross-site, cross-customer or otherwise.
Lists are catching up but the Corbacount tracker is not in EasyList or EasyPrivacy by default. The tracker loads from your own domain, so the typical blocking pattern that catches GA does not catch us.
A tiny snippet of 2.2 KB gzipped (7.3 KB raw) using sendBeacon, never blocking your page. Every pageview is counted; nothing is "sampled away" because we crossed an arbitrary threshold.
Visitors, sources, conversions, SEO and Core Web Vitals on the same page. No Looker Studio bolt-on, no separate Search Console tab, no half-broken funnel report.
| Google Analytics 4 | Corbacount | |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting location | United States | Germany (EU) |
| Cookie consent banner needed | Yes | Far lighter footprint |
| Shares data with an ad network | Yes | No |
| Blocked by major ad-blockers | Yes | Not by default |
| Data sampling on busy sites | Yes | Never |
| Real-time visitors | Yes | Yes |
| Goals & multi-step funnels | Yes (events, complex) | Yes (URL or JS, simple) |
| Core Web Vitals (LCP/INP/CLS) | Not in standard reports | Built-in |
| SEO data (backlinks, keywords) | No | Yes (DataForSEO + GSC) |
| Ask your own AI questions (MCP) | No | Yes, via the MCP server |
| Price for one site | Free, or $50k/year (GA360) | €4/month |
| Customer support | Community + docs | Real humans |
Google Analytics details and pricing as published at the time of writing - check Google's own pages for their current offer. We aim to keep this fair; tell us if something is outdated. Last checked: 12 June 2026.
Yes - GSC is a different product. It tells you how Google shows your site in search. Corbacount connects to your GSC property and surfaces the data in your dashboard, so you do not have to switch tabs.
No - and that is the point. We count visitors that GA misses (the ad-block-using third of your audience) and we do not sample your data away on busy days. Expect Corbacount numbers to be higher and more stable.
All good. We line up with their privacy stance and add the SEO + backlinks + Web Vitals layer they leave out. If you only want visitor counts, those tools are fine; if you want one dashboard that also covers SEO, that is what we are building. We compared them in detail: Corbacount vs Plausible, Corbacount vs Matomo, Corbacount vs Fathom and Corbacount vs Umami.
Of course - the tracker is one snippet you can drop alongside GA. Run them in parallel for a month, compare, then turn GA off when you are ready.
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