Google Analytics is free and can do almost anything. It's also slow to learn, it needs a cookie banner in most of Europe, and ad blockers stop a lot of it. Datasense is the simple alternative: one page, an optional cookieless mode, and the numbers you actually look at.
Free up to 10k pageviews a month. No card.
If you run Google Ads and need deep marketing reports, keep Google Analytics. If you want to open one page and see who's on your site, where they came from and what broke, Datasense is easier.
Side by side, on the things people ask about most. Checked against Google Analytics's own site in October 2026.
| Feature | Datasense | Google Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 10k pageviews a month, 1 site | Free for most sites |
| Paid plans from | $9/month for 100k pageviews | Free; GA4 360 has enterprise pricing |
| No cookie banner needed | Cookies by default; switch any site to cookieless | Uses cookies, so a banner is usually needed in the EU and UK |
| Realtime visitors | Updates every second | Realtime report |
| JavaScript error tracking | Last 100 errors per site, with stack and browser | Not built in |
| Revenue by traffic source | Stripe, Dodo Payments or any provider | Through ecommerce events you send |
| Goals and custom events | One line of code or a data attribute | Key events and custom events |
| Proxy to get past ad blockers | Recipes for Next.js, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Nginx | Server-side tagging, with more setup |
| AI crawler and bot tracking | See which AI crawlers read your pages | Known bots are hidden, not reported |
| Visitor profiles and journeys | Each visitor's pages, visit by visit | User explorer |
| Raw data export | CSV and JSON, any date range | BigQuery export and Data API |
| Script size | Under 3 KB | About 150 KB |
| Open source / self-host |
Google Analytics 4 has a lot of menus, and finding something simple like "top pages this week" can take a while. Datasense puts visitors, pages, sources, countries, devices and goals on one page. You pick a date range and you're done.
Google Analytics sets cookies to track people over time. In the EU and UK that usually means asking for consent first, and many visitors say no. Datasense uses a first-party cookie by default to recognize returning visitors, and that usually needs consent too. If you'd rather skip the banner, one setting switches a site to cookieless mode. It then counts unique visitors with a hash that changes every day.
Datasense also records JavaScript errors from real browsers, so you can see when a page breaks. It can also show which AI crawlers, like GPTBot or ClaudeBot, read your pages. Google Analytics doesn't do either of these.
The Google tag is around 150 KB. The Datasense script is under 3 KB and never blocks your page from loading. That helps your page speed and Core Web Vitals.
Google Analytics is free for almost everyone. The paid version, GA4 360, is for large companies and is priced through sales. Datasense is free up to 10k pageviews a month, then $9 a month for 100k pageviews. So Google is cheaper. You pay Datasense for the simpler dashboard, the error tracking and the privacy.
It takes about five minutes, and you don't have to turn anything off on day one.
Create a free account and paste one script tag into your site's <head>. Leave Google Analytics where it is for now.
Compare visitors, top pages and sources. Datasense often shows more visitors once the proxy is on, because ad blockers stop blocking it.
When you're happy, delete the Google Analytics snippet. Export your old data from Google Analytics first if you want to keep it.
Or see all web analytics tools on one page.
Add one script tag, compare the numbers, then keep the one you like. The free plan is enough to test it.
Add your siteGoogle Analytics is a trademark of its owner. Facts checked October 2026; if something changed, tell us at [email protected].