NvisionData vs GA4
Google Analytics 4 — the default web analytics tool. GA4 site
GA4 is free, ships with audience export to Google Ads out of the box, and every marketing agency on earth already knows the UI. For a small site that lives entirely inside the Google ecosystem, the activation energy of switching is genuinely hard to justify.
Sampling, thresholding, data deletion at 14 months (or 26 on 360), and a UI that hides as much as it shows. Once you outgrow "what is my pageview count," every interesting question is either "go pay $150k for GA4 360" or "export to BigQuery and rebuild the metric yourself." Consent Mode v2 modelling is a black box you cannot audit.
| Dimension | NvisionData | GA4 |
|---|---|---|
| Ingestion model | Server-side first, client SDK optional | Client-side gtag, server-side via custom Tag Manager setup |
| Sampling | None — every event materialised | Sampling kicks in past 10M events on standard reports |
| Cardinality limits | None on warehouse, 50k high-card values on rollups | "(other)" bucket on high-cardinality dimensions |
| Raw data access | BYO ClickHouse / BigQuery / Snowflake — you own the rows | BigQuery export on 360, daily batch, schema you do not control |
| Consent signals on event | 4-bit consent vector per event, queryable | Consent Mode v2 modelling, opaque |
| Data residency | EU option, customer's own warehouse | US default, EU regional control on 360 |
| Retention | 36 months default, extendable indefinitely | 2 / 14 months free, 26 months on 360 |
| Activation to ads | 6 connectors with consent gating + DSAR cascade | Google Ads only (native), others via GTM |
| License | FSL-1.1-ALv2 → Apache-2.0 in 2 years | Proprietary SaaS |
| Self-host | $999/mo Helm chart | Not available at any price |
You are a small site, your stack is fully Google (Search Console, Google Ads, YouTube), and your team's analytics literacy peaks at "what was traffic last week." GA4 will do this for free, integrate with Google Ads in one click, and your agency already knows it. The moment you ask harder questions — "what is the LTV of the cohort that came in via paid search in Q2" — the export-to-BigQuery-and-build-it-yourself tax kicks in, and the equation flips. But until then, the boring answer is honest: just use GA4.
True for the SaaS comparison; less true once you factor in BigQuery storage + query costs of GA4 360 ($150k/yr floor) or the engineering time to rebuild metrics on raw exports. Our Pro plan at $29/mo gets you unsampled retention and warehouse access; our Free plan covers the GA4 use case.
Run them side-by-side. Our SDK ships alongside gtag; the server-side collector accepts both shapes. Most teams keep GA4 as the "comfort copy" for 90 days while building reports on our warehouse.
We emit the same 4 signals (ad_storage, analytics_storage, ad_user_data, ad_personalization) on every event, and we let you query them. GA4's modelling pretends data exists when consent does not; we let you see what is modelled vs. measured.
Same tracking plan, your warehouse, consent-gated activation.