OakData vs Google Analytics
GA4 counts traffic. OakData knows people.
Google Analytics aggregates visitors into reports. OakData resolves them into real people you can open, watch, and follow from first touch to revenue.
Google Analytics 4 is the default choice. It's free, it's everywhere, and it integrates deeply with Google Ads. It's also built around aggregates: GA4 tells you how many users did something, applies sampling and thresholding to larger reports, and keeps individuals mostly out of reach.
OakData starts from the opposite end. Every event belongs to a person from the moment it's captured. Instead of a sampled chart, you get the actual list of people behind every number, with their sessions, replays, and revenue attached. GA4 answers "how many?" OakData also answers "who, and what exactly happened?"
Side by side
 OakData | Google Analytics | |
|---|---|---|
| Person-level profiles | Yes | Aggregated, User-ID setup required |
| Session replay | Yes | No |
| Heatmaps | Yes | No |
| Funnels | Built-in, drill to person | Via Explorations |
| Error monitoring | Yes | No |
| Core Web Vitals | Built-in, per page | Requires custom setup |
| Autocapture | Clicks, forms, rage clicks, errors | Enhanced measurement (partial) |
| Stripe revenue & MRR | Yes | No |
| Unsampled reports | Yes | Sampling and thresholding apply |
| Bot filtering | Layered: UA, IP ranges, ASN, headless | Known-bot list |
| AI agent access (MCP) | Yes | No |
| Google Ads integration | Captures gclid for attribution | Native, deepest available |
| Price | 14-day free trial, then usage-based | Free (GA360 for enterprise) |
Based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Features and pricing change, so verify anything decision-critical against Google Analytics's current site.
Choose OakData if…
- You want to see the actual people behind your numbers: profiles, sessions, and replays, not sampled aggregates.
- You want replay, heatmaps, funnels, errors, and revenue in one tool instead of stitching together three products.
- Your team avoids GA4's interface. Reports you can read in seconds beat Explorations you have to build.
- You want your AI agent querying analytics over MCP.
Choose Google Analytics if…
- You need a free tool forever, at any traffic volume.
- Your marketing runs on Google Ads and you want the deepest possible native integration for bidding and audiences.
- You need GA's ecosystem: BigQuery export, Looker Studio templates, and an agency workforce trained on it.
Questions
If you want person-level insight into who visited, what their journey was, and what their session looked like, yes. OakData includes session replay, heatmaps, funnels, error monitoring, and Stripe revenue in one tool. If all you need is free aggregate traffic reporting, GA4 remains hard to beat at its price.
No. GA4 applies sampling in Explorations and thresholding when audiences are small. OakData reports on every event it captures. The numbers you see are the numbers that happened.
Yes, and many teams do during migration. The snippets don't conflict, so you can compare numbers side by side before switching over.
Yes. OakData captures gclid (plus fbclid, ttclid, and eight more click IDs) automatically and attributes revenue back to campaigns across the full journey, not just the last click.
More comparisons
Decide with data
Run both. Keep the one that tells you more.
The snippets don't conflict. Install OakData next to your current tool and compare for a week.
14-day free trial