sonex vs Google Analytics (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 is free, ubiquitous, and the reason most websites have a cookie banner. sonex is a paid, cookieless alternative that leads with revenue. The short version: GA4 gives you more surface area and costs you a consent banner, 122 kB of JavaScript and a 14-month retention cap. sonex gives you the reports most sites read, in under 3 kB, with nothing stored on your visitors’ devices.

Everything below was checked against Google’s own documentation and a direct measurement of both scripts on 2026-08-17.

At a glance

	sonex	Google Analytics 4
Price	Free for 2k events, then $20/mo	Free
Cookies	None	Yes
Consent banner in EU/UK	Not needed	Generally required
Tracker size (brotli, measured)	2,968 bytes	122,345 bytes
Event data retention	6 months free, 1 year Pro, 5 years Business	2 or 14 months
Revenue from Stripe or Polar	Native, read-only key	Manual purchase events you implement
Setup to first useful report	One script tag	Property, data stream, events, conversions, consent mode
Who the product serves	You, the paying customer	Google’s advertising business
Data used for advertising	Never	Depends on your settings

Retention: the limit nobody reads

This is the most consequential difference and the least discussed. Google’s own documentation sets GA4 event-level retention at 2 or 14 months, configurable, on the free version. Google Signals data is capped at 26 months regardless of that setting.

Fourteen months means you cannot run a true year-over-year comparison for long. Ask “how did last August compare to the August before” in month fifteen and the answer is gone, permanently, from a tool that is otherwise sophisticated enough to model conversions it never observed.

sonex keeps six months on the free plan, a year on Pro and five years on Business. If long-range comparison matters to you, this row alone may decide it.

Privacy and the consent banner

GA4 sets cookies and processes personal data, which puts it inside both the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive. The ePrivacy requirement is the one that produces the banner, and it is triggered by the storage itself rather than by what the data contains.

Google’s answer is Consent Mode, which adjusts tag behaviour based on what the visitor chose and fills the resulting gaps with modelled estimates. That is a reasonable engineering response to a legal constraint. It is still a banner, still a share of visitors who decline, and still numbers that are partly modelled rather than observed.

sonex never triggers the requirement. Nothing is written to the device, so there is no storage to consent to. Visitors are recognised by a salted hash that rotates daily, so the identity cannot be reconstructed across days by anyone, including us.

The practical consequence: every visitor is counted the same way, because none of them was asked a question first.

Weight

122,345 bytes brotli against 2,968. Forty-one times the JavaScript, downloaded, parsed and executed on every page load by every visitor.

The download is the smaller half of that cost. Parsing and executing a fifth of a megabyte of JavaScript happens on the main thread, competing with your own page during exactly the window in which it is trying to become interactive — which is what Interaction to Next Paint measures, with a 200 ms threshold at the 75th percentile.

We published the full measurement across thirteen trackers, including the method, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Revenue

GA4 can report revenue, but you implement it: send a purchase event with a value and currency at the right moment. Google’s documentation is explicit that these events are not sent automatically and require additional context to be meaningful.

That means revenue in GA4 inherits every gap in client-side measurement. A blocked tracker loses the sale. A checkout that completes on the payment provider’s domain loses the sale. A tab closed before the beacon fires loses the sale.

sonex reads revenue from Stripe or Polar through their APIs. The payment provider is a system of record — it knows what arrived, net of refunds — and it is never blocked, because the money already moved. It is included on every plan, and it requires no instrumentation.

Where GA4 is genuinely better

We would not switch away from GA4 for every use, and pretending otherwise would be useless to you.

• Google Ads integration. If you are running paid search at volume, GA4’s coupling to Ads, Search Console and BigQuery is a real operational advantage with no equivalent elsewhere.
• Free, at any scale. A site doing fifty million pageviews a month pays nothing. Our Business plan covers two million events.
• Depth of configuration. Custom dimensions, audiences, explorations, modelling. If you have an analyst whose job is GA4, they can do things no simple tool can.
• BigQuery export. Raw event export to a warehouse, free, is genuinely valuable if you have a data team.

Where sonex is better

• No banner, ever, because there is nothing to consent to.
• 41x lighter.
• Revenue from a system of record, on every plan.
• Retention that outlives fourteen months.
• Comprehensible immediately. The dashboard opens on the answer rather than on a report builder.
• No conflict of interest. You are the customer, not the inventory. Your visitors’ behaviour is not an input to an advertising business.

Migrating

1. Import your history. sonex accepts GA4 or CSV exports, so the past does not have to end when the tag does.
2. Add the sonex tag to your <head> with your website id.
3. Run both for a fortnight. The numbers will not match — they never do between any two tools, and GA4’s modelled figures make the gap wider. Compare the shape of the trends, not the absolute counts.
4. Remove the GA tag and the consent banner, if analytics was the only thing that required it. Advertising pixels, embedded video and chat widgets bring their own requirements and have to be handled separately.

Expect your visitor numbers to change in both directions: no consent gate means counting people GA4 never saw, and no modelling means not counting people GA4 estimated.

The honest recommendation

If you run serious paid acquisition through Google Ads, or you have a data team living in BigQuery, GA4’s integrations are worth its costs and you should keep it.

If you are a site owner who wants to know how many people came, where from, and whether any of it earned money — and would rather not run a consent banner or a fifth of a megabyte of advertising infrastructure to find out — that is the case for switching, and it is the case sonex is built around.

Facts checked against Google’s own support documentation on 2026-08-17. Script sizes measured the same day.