Piwik PRO vs.
Google Analytics 360 & Google Analytics 4 360

Google recently announced their plans to sunset the previous version of Google Analytics, known as Universal Analytics or GA3. It is being replaced by Google Analytics 4. All standard Universal Analytics properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. After this date, you will only be able to view historical reports of previously processed data in Universal Analytics for up to six months. 

If you’re using the paid version of Google Analytics (known as Google Analytics 360), these properties will stop processing new hits on October 1, 2023. Website owners and marketers will then be forced to transition to Google Analytics 4 360. The new Analytics 360 builds on the foundation of Google Analytics 4. This greatly changed platform may cause problems for those used to the UA interface. 

However, there are other reasons why you might consider an alternative to the Mountain View giant’s product:

• Privacy compliance. If your organization manages personal data and personally identifiable information (PII) on a daily basis, make sure you do this in line with data protection regulations. You might have to keep the data in your country because of data residency and sovereignty laws, the requirements of GDPR, HIPAA or the European Banking Authority guidelines. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The solution would be to have the data stored on-premises or in a private cloud to ensure appropriate security and regulatory compliance.

• Sharing your data is not an option. You don’t want to reveal or share information about your visitors with Google. You realize that they would use that data for advertising, to enhance ad targeting and personalization, even your competitors’ ads. So you need complete control over it.
• Financial aspects. Maybe the free version of GA doesn’t meet your expectations. You’re looking for a more competitively priced analytics platform than the premium version of Google Analytics – Google Analytics 360. You might think about another solution that gives you a full stack of useful features without overspending your budget.
• Support and professional expertise. Whether you face technical problems, need assistance with product implementation and onboarding, or want consulting on analytics issues. You want to make the best use of the software so expect some extra service.

With all this in mind, the following chapters will give you an extensive comparison between both Google Analytics 360 platforms and Piwik PRO, in the Enterprise plan. We’ve prepared it taking into consideration criteria such as:

• Hosting options
• Data processing and connectivity
• Analytics – data collection flexibility
• Reporting features and integrations
• Data control, privacy and anonymization
• Tag manager
• Customer care & SLA
• Data security

Below you’ll find a table that covers only the most crucial aspects you should take into account  from the business angle. For full coverage, we recommend reading the whole page.

Piwik PRO lets you choose a flexible hosting plan. You can deploy the platform on your own infrastructure, in AWS, Microsoft Azure and Elastx private clouds or a public cloud with secure servers located in Germany, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Sweden, or the US. You decide in which data center your information will reside. 

Ensuring the right data storage setup is critical if your organization handles personal data, especially sensitive data. This applies to the healthcare, government, banking and telecoms sectors in particular. Security demands in these areas are extremely stringent as the risk is immense. 

Google Analytics 360 and Google Analytics 4 360 only offer cloud deployment. It means your data will be transferred across Google’s data centers in North & South America, Europe and Asia. From a privacy perspective this can raise certain legal issues – we’ll talk about that more in chapter 6.

With Google Analytics 360, you have to overcome some hurdles. First, you wait up to 4 hours for your reports. In GA4 360 this takes about 1h. Second, you can expect sampling when you reach more than 100M monthly sessions in GA 360 and 1 billion sessions in GA 4 360. Third, you need BigQuery to have access to raw data, and the oldest records you get will be from up to 13 months. 

In Piwik PRO you can count on data freshness every 30 minutes, and sampling is done only on request. In other words, even if your website records hundreds of millions of actions per month you still have smooth access to complete analytics data sets.

In Piwik PRO raw data is available directly, without any additional software or plugins. You also access valuable historical information from 25 months or more, depending on your configuration or contract. 

It’s worth mentioning that all vendors offer a reporting API to extract aggregated report data or enrich your analyses. You can take advantage of the integration with popular BI and data visualization software such as Tableau, Power BI and Looker Studio (previously Google Data Studio). But there are also some differences. For example, there is no Google Sheets integration with Google Analytics 4 360.

*Piwik PRO – Data from 25 months or more, depending on your configuration or contract

With Piwik PRO and both GA360, you can obtain any data through custom dimensions. In addition to that, you receive standard JavaScript tags and support for mobile SDK to gather information from different apps.

What’s more, in Piwik PRO you can track an unlimited number of websites. In GA360 and GA4 360 you have only 100 properties by default, but you can upgrade to a higher number on request. 

At first glance, the platforms seem similar in terms of reporting features and integrations, as they allow you to:

• Track web and mobile apps by means of JavaScript and SDKs.
• Get insight into user actions and characteristics with audience, acquisition and behavior reporting.
• Take advantage of easy-to-use custom reports.

That said, there are some crucial differences in how the platforms collect and present data. Let’s have a look at what you can expect from them.

Processing personal data

If you’d like to collect and process personal data, Google platforms won’t be the right partner for the job. At Google’s help center you can read that:

To protect user privacy, Google policies mandate that no data be passed to Google that Google could use or recognize as personally identifiable information (PII). PII includes, but is not limited to, information such as email addresses, personal mobile numbers, and social security numbers. [source]

This means that even your user-level reports in GA should be stripped of PII. Otherwise, you are violating the platform’s terms of service. This can result in Google suspending your GA account.

As for Piwik PRO, both plans let you gather personal data, including sensitive information, and safeguard its privacy and security with Consent Manager and additional data protection measures.

Secure member areas analytics

Now let’s move on to analyzing data in secure member areas of your websites and apps.

If you decide to analyze and use the information from those places, make sure you are doing it with software that provides the highest level of security.

Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 won’t give you control over where your data is stored. Also, they use your data to improve their services and share it with numerous products, including Google Ads. For these reasons, they may not be the right products to analyze data from sensitive areas of your website or app.

Piwik PRO gives you full data control. On top of that, the Enterprise plan allows you to decide where you store the collected information – in a public cloud, private cloud or on your own premises. 

With Piwik PRO Core you get secure cloud hosting in Germany. You can also apply consent management to further protect the privacy of your visitors and fulfill regulatory requirements.

Multi-channel attribution tools

The customer journey rarely finishes in a single browsing session, which makes it difficult to analyze which channel or touchpoint should get credit for the conversion. Both Piwik PRO and Universal Analytics offer multi-channel attribution tools to help you with this task.  

Besides predefined attribution models, you get custom ones to fit your business needs. You’re able to analyze:

• Conversion paths – the traffic channels (channel, medium, source/medium, source) visitors use before they convert
• Time to conversion – how many days visitors take to convert
• Path length – the touchpoints visitors use before they convert
• Compare attribution models such as last-click, position-based, first-click, last-non-direct-click, time-decay, linear and custom to make a more complex and detailed evaluation of channels and touchpoints.  

What’s more, Universal Analytics allows you to segment your attribution reports. It provides you with data-driven attribution reports that work based on algorithms and let you assess converting and non-converting paths.

Funnel analytics

In Piwik PRO, you can build funnels out of any type of page view and custom event. In addition, funnels are:

• Retroactive – present historical data tracked before the funnel was defined
• Available immediately after creation
• Flexible – don’t require a goal as the last step
• Filtrable – allow you to define each step in the funnel at a highly granular level

No matter when you decide to configure your funnel, you’ll always have access to the full dataset of both historical and recent user actions. 

In turn, funnel visualization in Universal Analytics:

• Requires assigning a goal.
• Can’t be viewed using a specific segment of sessions.
• Doesn’t include historical data. [source]

The Universal Analytics goal funnels appear in the funnel visualization and goal flow report.

Google Analytics 4 users have access to funnel exploration features. 
In GA4, funnel exploration utilizes data that’s already been collected. In Universal Analytics, using funnels requires defining a goal. The report will only show data collected going forward from that point. Whereas in Universal Analytics step customization is based on Page dimension, in GA4 it is based broadly on events, with filtering by other dimensions.

The GA4 funnel report looks like the one below:

User flow reporting

Piwik PRO’s user flow reports provide you with the following options:

• To set up a user flow report for interactions such as a page view, download, search, custom event, and more.
• To see a breakdown of dimensions related to sessions. For example, you can view channels, referrers or campaigns.
• To add up to ten interactions.

The user flow in Piwik PRO has three settings that help you analyze visitor paths:

• Standard: shows you the next interactions after the key interaction.
• Transition: illustrates the interactions before and after the key interaction.
• Reverse: shows you the interactions preceding the key interaction.

As for Universal Analytics, it offers many types of flow reporting. The list includes:

• Behavior flow
• Goal flow
• Users flow
• Events flow
• Funnel visualization
• Google Play referral flow

However, when using them you’ll stumble across the following limitations, which Piwik PRO doesn’t have:

• Flow reports support only session-based segments. User-based segments are disabled for flow reports. You can apply only a single segment to a flow report.
• Flow reports cannot display data for more than 100,000 sessions. If you have more than 100,000 sessions in the data set, the sampled data appears in the flow reports. Adjust the date range to reduce the number of sessions in the report. [source]

GA4 doesn’t have a behavior flow report. Instead, you can use your exploration templates to follow your user’s journey. Use your funnel exploration report to track a predetermined path or your path exploration for free-form tracking.

The first option is a funnel exploration report – you can view an example in the previous section. It lets you pre-select the path you want to investigate. 

The second option is a path exploration report. It allows you to look at your user’s journey, but it is free-flowing.

Network domain and service provider dimensions

Omitting the traffic that comes from inside your organization allows you to focus on data related to external visitors – your present and future customers.

In Piwik PRO, your reports can ignore internal traffic for each website or app, or for the whole account. In Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics the lack of support for network domain and service provider dimensions means you may have issues with excluding those sources from your reports.

Custom channel grouping

Piwik PRO and Universal Analytics offer a handy feature called custom channel grouping that provides flexibility in organizing your incoming traffic. You can connect all traffic sources to your website in one channel grouping that you define.  

For example, connect similar referrer URLs into one group. Take Facebook traffic and the different subdomains it uses. Instead of having multiple rows in your source/medium report (each one for Facebook traffic), you can get just one – Facebook organic.

Piwik PRO lets you create 10 groups in one custom grouping, but this limit can be increased. Universal Analytics, in contrast, lets you create 50 groups. 

Custom channel grouping is not available in Google Analytics 4. You can report the performance of a marketing channel using the exploration report. 

GA4 does not consolidate the data concerning a given channel. You need to identify all the traffic sources (referrers) belonging to a given channel and manually consolidate the data using the exploration report. You cannot edit the default channel group definitions. It means you have to follow a disciplined approach when applying the UTM parameters. 

Metasites

Metasites let you combine data from two or more websites to analyze them as a whole. They save you the time you’d have to spend on copying and calculating data for separate websites. Instead, you see all the relevant data in a single view:

You’ll be able to use this feature in Piwik PRO, but Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 don’t provide you with this functionality.

Real-time analytics

In Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, real-time reports allow you to monitor activity on your website as it happens. For example, you can see how many people are on your site, which pages or events they’re interacting with and what goals they complete.

You won’t have this option with Piwik PRO. Currently, the data has a 30-minute delay to allow for sessions to complete before displaying them in the session log. We plan on adding full real-time reporting in the future.

Integrations 

In Piwik PRO you’ll find:

• Full integration with Search Console allowing you to combine GSC and analytics data. 
• Google Ads integration – to let you keep track of your marketing budget and stay up to date with campaign results.
• Looker Studio integration (formerly Google Data Studio) – to connect analytics data with data from different sources and use it in one dashboard in Looker Studio.
• Google Sheets integration – to allow you to work with your analytics data in Google Sheets and easily manipulate, filter, and visualize it as you want it.
• Additional synchronous tag templates allowing you to use A/B testing tools such as Optimizely, VWO, AB Tasty.

To the surprise of no one, Google platforms provide you with native integrations with Google Ads, Google Search Console and A/B testing tools. But there are also some differences. For example, there is no Google Sheets integration with Google Analytics 4.

SharePoint analytics

If your organization uses SharePoint, you may want to seek an analytics platform that, in addition to tracking your business websites and apps, can also analyze user behavior in your digital workspace. 
You’ll get this option as part of the Piwik PRO Enterprise plan. Among other things, it lets you:

• Find out how users engage with your publications and news web elements – what they like, save for later, follow and comment on.
• Enrich analytics data with User Profile Attributes retrieved from SharePoint Active Directory such as user login, user display name, office location, department and job title.
• Track your internal email campaigns.
• Organize your reports by team and office location.

Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 don’t provide a dedicated integration with SharePoint. You can try to connect your intranet website with the platforms manually, but this solution has some serious drawbacks. Among other things, you won’t be able to track SharePoint-specific user characteristics or collect and upload personal data, e.g. from your Active Directory. 

Data control and sharing

Both Google Analytics platforms and Piwik PRO grant you full control of the user details you gather. It means you’re accountable for them, but also have access to and control over the data. Moreover, you know the location of the recorded information and can decide what appropriate safeguards should apply. 

Piwik PRO takes it a step further. It doesn’t share any of your data with third parties.
In the case of Google, it’s shared with Google Ads clients and other Google products. However, with GA4 360 this is optional.

Data residency

Various countries across the globe, such as Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Russia, Italy and Switzerland, have enacted laws that order companies to store their residents’ personal data within the country’s physical borders.

Given that, when using Google Analytics to gather and process such information you’ll have trouble fulfilling this obligation. Google Analytics 4 collects all data from EU-based devices (based on IP-geo lookup) through domains and on servers based in the EU before forwarding traffic to Analytics servers for processing. The tech giant holds data in clouds across its data centers somewhere in North and South America, Europe, and Asia – but you don’t know where exactly. 

Piwik PRO lets you save your customers’ information on servers located in one of the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure regions of your choice or on your own infrastructure. You can also take advantage of a European-owned data center in Sweden provided by Elastx.

Privacy laws & consent management

GDPR created a framework that new laws, be it CCPA, LGPD, Chile Privacy Bill Initiative, or New Zealand Privacy Bill, have implemented as well. The key principle they share is to obtain users consent to accumulate and process their data. However, GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA oblige you to do business only with compliant partners. If not, you put yourself at risk of heavy fines.

The bad news is that Google Analytics 360, both old and new, might not be a suitable choice. Consider GDPR, the privacy gold standard. It obligates you to acquire users’ consent and doesn’t allow you to process personal data without it. 

We’ve already discussed Google’s approach to collecting, sharing and storing personal data. It won’t let you achieve regulatory compliance. Check the next section for more details. 

Consequently, you still have to ask users for permission to process their data. What’s more, the vendor doesn’t give you any mechanisms to acquire and manage consents. The only solution is to connect some third-party tool for that purpose.

In Piwik PRO, respect for privacy is ingrained in the company’s strategy. Our product has been audited by a top-tier global consulting company that regards our platform as compliant and capable of helping organizations operate in line with legal regulations. 

Piwik PRO equips you with dedicated software, Consent Manager, to meet your legal responsibilities. It enables you to obtain and manage consent decisions and data subject requests.

In addition, you can track all changes to visitors’ decisions and then process data in alignment with your users’ choices.

Data anonymization

Google Analytics 360’s approach to anonymization is to avoid collecting any information that can be regarded as personal data or PII, apart from: 

Online identifiers, including cookie identifiers, internet protocol addresses and device identifiers; client identifiers [source]. 

The tech giant advises you to anonymize this kind of data if you want to use it. But Alphabet gives you only an anonymization method for IP addresses. So it’s your job to encrypt other identifiers with the minimum hashing requirement of SHA256. 

Keep in mind that hashing is not a sufficient anonymization and under the GDPR this type of information is considered personal data. That’s why hashed data requires consent for gathering and processing it. Even if you follow Google’s best practices to avoid sending PII and anonymize IP addresses, GA still gathers personal data as it saves unique identifiers in a cookie. 

Piwik PRO, on the other hand, allows you to tackle compliance in two ways:

• By turning on Piwik PRO Consent Manager. It’s a piece of software dedicated to collecting, managing, and storing both records of consent decisions and data subject requests. You configure it using a visual interface.
• By anonymizing your data using one of three available methods. You can read more about them here: 6 ways analytics software collects data online.

Anonymization mode can also be used in combination with Consent Manager, when a visitor declines or disregards your consent request. Then, if a user grants you consents later in the session, you’ll be able to merge their anonymous and personal data into a single record.

Additionally, you can enable zero-identity tracking, a method that combines several privacy settings in Piwik PRO to let you obtain as much data as possible without personal data. You gather event statistics without using any visitor or session identifiers, only anonymous data. All in all, in this process consent isn’t necessary.

*Consent mode allows data to be saved without IP address and cookie ID. However, the data is only available in BigQuery if you have integration. It’s not available in the product UI.
**Google’s IP anonymization doesn’t protect data.

Tag deployment & management

GA360 and Piwik PRO provide a tag manager full of useful features. They range from:

• Asynchronous tag support
• Rich library of triggers
• Condition and tag templates
• Custom tags
• Variables
• Analytics tag templates

You can benefit from tag and debug mode as well as from export and import of tag configuration. 

All of that improves your quality assurance and reliable tag management. 

In both GA360s you have workspaces for concurrent tagging projects. This allows your team members to independently work on tag configurations, revert changes and prevent the publishing of unfinished modifications. Therefore, you have more control and keep your tags up to the right standard.

On the opposite side, Piwik PRO Tag Manager supports synchronous tags to eliminate a possible flash of original content when you run A/B tests. Plus, you have content personalization and custom pop-ups at your fingertips to enhance your marketing campaigns by applying tailored banners, ads and HTML elements.

Privacy features

Thanks to Piwik PRO’s integrated Consent Manager, you can define which tags require prior consent and adjust your tracking to user privacy preferences. Also, it guarantees zero cookie load, preventing your tags from firing and tracking a visitor before you obtain legal permission. By granting users an opt-out option, you also comply with CCPA and other privacy laws. 

Google’s Tag Manager 360 won’t equip you with any of that. In terms of privacy, you need to figure out on your own how to guarantee it. As you don’t have an out-of-the-box solution, you have to implement some additional code and configure tags accordingly.

In terms of customer care and support, Piwik PRO offers to all clients:

Dedicated account manager – who works with you to understand your expectations, then defines your goals, creates an implementation plan, and assists you in learning.

Dedicated service delivery manager – your first point of contact in case of emergency incidents or web analytics performance issues, to ensure that they are always resolved quickly.

Guides & documentation – extensive technical documentation and product guides to  understand our platform.

Personalized support and onboarding – our team lends you a hand while setting up and configuring your web analytics instance. Our SLA ensures all your needs are addressed while you use the product. We can provide those services on-site in cooperation with your internal team.

Custom integration and development (extra service) – we integrate PPAS with any product in your data ecosystem (e.g. CRMs or BI tools), and through custom development we adjust the platform to your needs.

Analytics consulting (extra service) – after auditing your current setup, we recommend how to adjust your tracking and reporting to achieve your business goals. 

On-demand custom training and workshops (extra service) – we teach you the skills essential to employ analytics data in your daily work. We tailor each training to the use cases of particular teams and stakeholders.

24/7 monitoring and incident handling – we monitor the system, receive notification of all issues and solve them on the spot, ensuring your platform runs smoothly.

In both versions of Google Analytics 360 you can contact a dedicated support specialist and use live-chat support to resolve your questions regarding products, services and employing data. You have extensive online documentation and a community forum at your disposal. Google’s team ensures SLA of 99% uptime.  

For everything else, you have to rely on your own skills. Whether it’s product implementation, learning its features, or creating a tracking plan, you do it yourself.

ISO 27001 certification

Piwik PRO and Google Analytics platforms undertake external security audits and provide their clients with data hosting on redundant, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certified infrastructure. They also let you manage access to your analytics instance by creating user groups and assigning them with different permission levels. 

Finally, Piwik PRO and Google alike are ISO 27001-certified as companies. However, Piwik PRO lets you choose your storage infrastructure: on-premises, in a private cloud or at a third-party data center.

Security review

Data security is an ongoing process. That’s why both Piwik PRO and Google Analytics 360 undertake regular external audits. 

Furthermore, at Piwik PRO independent security researchers perform regular penetration tests and security reviews of our platform. We provide our clients on request with all the results and evaluations along with security policies, certifications and implemented safety measures. 

HIPAA compliance

Organizations that manage protected health information (PHI) of US citizens must ensure the right protective measures are in place to guard it. Piwik PRO fulfills HIPAA obligations while ensuring top-level data security. That applies particularly to storing PHI within US borders, encrypting it in all circumstances. 

Google Analytics 360 and Google Analytics 4 360 won’t support you in achieving HIPAA conformity. First, because “you may not send Google Analytics encrypted Protected Health Information (as defined under HIPAA), even if it is hashed or salted.”[source] Meaning, you can’t use it in Google at all. 

Second, the only possible data storage is in the cloud. But without the exact location of servers, the vendor can’t meet the key regulatory obligation of keeping citizens’ records within US territory.

Single sign-on authentication (SSO)

One of the ways to shield your data is by restricting access to it. Piwik PRO, GA4 360 and GA360 enable that by implementing your preferred SSO authentication including SAML integration. However, in Google it’s available only via G Suite Enterprise, a Premium office suite with extra safety and customization features.

We hope that putting those products side-by-side makes it easier to find the right one for your organization. All have a wide range of reporting, integration and data visualization features.

Despite that, there are some prominent differences, namely:

• Conformity with privacy and security legislation, including GDPR, HIPAA and CCPA
• Professional support and customer care that involves onboarding, implementation and consulting
• Flexibility of collecting, crunching and storing data, and the speed of report generation
• Availability of custom integrations and variety of use cases supported by each vendor

We hope that all of the aspects we’ve analyzed in detail here will bring you closer to a final decision. 

This comparison is based on the publicly available information gathered in June 2022.