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Dataflare vs Google Analytics
Google Analytics is Google's free web and app analytics (GA4). Dataflare is open-source analytics that runs in your own Cloudflare account.
The short answer
Google Analytics is free, everywhere, and the right tool if you buy Google Ads and want conversions to flow into them. Choose Dataflare if you'd rather not send visitor data to Google, want a dashboard you can read without training, need session replay or A/B tests, or want your coding agent to answer questions about your traffic.
Side by side
| Feature | Dataflare | Google Analytics |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | Your own Cloudflare account (D1 and R2) | Google's servers |
| Source code | Open source, MIT | Proprietary |
| What you pay | Your Cloudflare bill: $0 on Workers Free for small sites, $5/month Workers Paid above that | Free (GA4); Analytics 360 is a paid enterprise tier |
| Cookieless mode | Yes | No; uses cookies (consent mode can limit them) |
| Web analytics | Yes, with Core Web Vitals and errors | Yes |
| Funnels and retention | Yes: trends, funnels, retention, cohorts | Yes (explorations) |
| Session replay | Yes, with a text transcript for agents | No |
| Feature flags and A/B tests | Yes: flags in your Worker, Bayesian experiment results | No |
| Raw SQL on your events | Yes, read-only SQL in the dashboard, CLI and MCP | Through BigQuery export |
Checked November 2026. Sources: GA4 data retention, Google Analytics 360. Spotted something out of date? Open an issue.
Choose Google Analytics if you want
- Free at any volume for most sites.
- Tight integration with Google Ads, Search Console and BigQuery.
- Demographics and audiences built from Google signals.
- Every marketer already knows it.
Choose Dataflare if you want
- Visitor data stays in your Cloudflare account and isn't used by an ad network.
- Cookieless mode stores nothing on the device.
- Session replay, feature flags and A/B tests in the same place as your analytics.
- Every number shows the SQL behind it, and raw events are yours to query without an export pipeline.
- Loads nothing from third-party domains when you serve Dataflare from your own domain with
--route.
Moving from Google Analytics to Dataflare
- Run
npx dataflare-cli initand add the script tag; keep GA4 running in parallel while you compare. - Map your GA4 key events to
glass.capture()calls. Pageviews, referrers, UTM tags, countries and devices are collected automatically. - Mark your conversions as key events so Reports show conversion by source.
- When you're happy, remove the gtag snippet (and, if you can, your cookie banner's analytics category).