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The privacy-first, provable alternative. GA4 is free and everywhere — but the learning curve is steep, reports get sampled at volume, default retention is two months, and installing it means adding a consent banner. Vitrus answers the same questions without cookies, and shows you the query behind every number it reports.
| Capability | Google Analytics 4 | Vitrus |
|---|---|---|
| Cookie-free, no consent banner | — | ✓ |
| Usable without a consent banner | — | ✓ |
| No data sampling | sampled at volume | ✓ |
| Default data retention | 2 months | 180 days – unlimited |
| AI referral ↔ AI crawler split | partial (AI channel only) | ✓ |
| Self-hostable | — | ✓ |
| Clickable query behind every number | — | ✓ |
| Unprovable AI sentences auto-dropped | — | ✓ |
| MCP server for AI agents | — | ✓ |
| Ad-platform attribution (Google/Meta Ads) | ✓ | — |
| Time to first number | property + tags + conversion setup | one script tag |
| Tracker size | ~28 KB (gtag) | 2.6 KB |
Features we don't have are shown as “—”. A comparison that hides its own gaps would contradict the one thing this product claims.
Stay on GA4 if you are optimising Google Ads or Meta Ads spend. Ad-platform attribution — ROAS, conversion feedback loops — works inside that ecosystem and we deliberately do not build it. GA4 is also the stronger choice if you stream raw events into BigQuery and model them yourself.
When your question is "where is my traffic coming from, where do people drop off, and is this number correct?" Especially if you want to measure AI assistant traffic: roughly 70% of it lands in GA4's "direct" bucket.
Yes, they coexist fine. Most people keep both scripts during a transition and compare the numbers — the gap itself is usually instructive.
Ad blockers stop gtag far more often than they stop us; our script is smaller and less recognisable. GA4 also samples at volume and we never do. The gap usually favours us, but read that as "less loss", not as "more correct".
For most sites, yes: we set no cookies, mint no persistent identifier and store no personal data. The final call still belongs to your counsel — we document the technical facts so they can make it.
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