Google Analytics 4 is the default choice for most teams simply because it’s free and everyone already knows the name. That doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for everyone — here’s a practical, non-hand-wavy comparison for teams actually deciding between the two.
Cookies and consent
GA4 sets cookies to identify visitors across sessions. That means a consent banner is legally required in most jurisdictions before you can track anyone, and a meaningful share of visitors will decline — GA4 then either drops them from your data or falls back to modeled/estimated numbers to fill the gap.
Mitr doesn’t use cookies at all. Anonymous visitors are identified server-side from request signals and hashed immediately; nothing is written to or read from the browser. No storage event means no consent banner is required in the first place. See why we built analytics without cookies for the mechanics.
Data: sampled vs. unsampled
GA4’s standard reporting interface applies sampling once you cross certain thresholds or use custom explorations, which can make smaller trends hard to trust. Mitr’s event pipeline is TimescaleDB-backed and doesn’t sample — what you see in the dashboard is the actual event count.
Platform coverage
GA4 is fundamentally a web-and-app analytics tool built around Google’s own SDKs. If you’re shipping a Flutter app across iOS, Android, desktop, and web, GA4 integration usually means Firebase Analytics plus platform-specific wiring. Mitr ships a first-party Flutter SDK (mitr_flutter) that covers all four targets from one Dart package, alongside a zero-dependency JS SDK for the web — see the Flutter analytics page for details.
Pricing
GA4 itself is free, but “free” doesn’t include a support relationship, and larger properties often end up on GA4 360 (Google’s enterprise tier, priced on a custom-quote basis that’s rarely cheap). Mitr’s tiers are volume-based and transparent:
| Plan | Monthly events | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 10,000 | $0 forever |
| Indie Pass | 100,000 | $7/mo (₹299) |
| Momentum | 400,000 | $15/mo |
| Growth Engine | 1,000,000 | $29/mo (₹1,499) |
| Power | 10,000,000 | $99/mo (₹5,999) |
Indian teams get real INR pricing rather than a converted dollar price — see pricing built for Indian teams. Current, live pricing is always on the homepage.
Integrations
GA4’s path to “notify another system when something happens” runs through BigQuery streaming export or Google Tag Manager triggers — both workable, but BigQuery export in particular is typically gated behind GA4 360, Google’s enterprise tier, priced on a custom quote. Mitr ships outbound webhooks directly: pick an event type, give it a destination URL, and get an HMAC-signed HTTP POST with retries built in — available even on the free tier. See the webhooks docs for setup and real use cases (Slack alerts, CRM sync, no-code automation).
Where GA4 still makes sense
If you’re already deep in the Google ecosystem — Google Ads attribution, BigQuery exports, a team that already knows the GA4 interface cold — switching has a real cost, and GA4’s breadth of integrations is hard to match. Mitr is the better fit if you want to stop maintaining a consent banner, want unsampled numbers, or are building for Flutter and don’t want to wire together three different native SDKs.