Analytics

Google Analytics 4 vs Matomo: Full Comparison

Published October 7, 2026

GA4 costs nothing and holds event-level data for 14 months on a standard property. Matomo's self-hosted edition also costs nothing and holds it for as long as your server does. That one difference explains most migrations in both directions.

This comparison is usually framed as free versus paid, which is wrong twice. Google Analytics is free. Matomo’s Community edition is also free, with unlimited users and unlimited monthly hits, because you host it yourself. Neither is the paid option.

What separates them is what happens to the data. Google holds yours, under Google’s retention rules, and gives you a tag and an interface in exchange. Matomo puts the database where you put it, keeps everything you collect for as long as you keep it, and hands you the server bill and the upgrade notices along with it.

The specific number that drives most migrations is retention. Google’s own documentation sets event-level data retention on a standard property at 2 or 14 months, with 26, 38 and 50 months available on 360 properties only. If someone has asked you for a three-year trend and you are on a standard property, you have met the constraint already.

At a Glance

Google Analytics has two editions. The standard one is free and has no pricing page, because there is no price. Analytics 360 is sold through Google Marketing Platform sales rather than published, and the Google Analytics help centre describes what it adds: longer event-level retention at 26, 38 or 50 months, and coverage by the Google Marketing Platform GA 360 Service Level Agreements, with an upgrade path from an existing Google Analytics 4 property.

Matomo publishes a ladder with hosting as the first choice. The Community edition is the on-premise download: free, unlimited users, unlimited monthly hits, forum support, with premium plugins such as Funnels bought individually. Cloud is hosted on Matomo’s servers and priced from a monthly hits calculator, starting at 29 per month excluding tax at 50,000 hits, with two months free on annual billing. The named plans run Team from €230/mo for up to 4 users and 5M monthly hits, Business from €1209/mo for up to 20 users and 30M hits, Enterprise from €2834/mo for up to 50 users and 100M hits, and VIP as a custom quote for 51+ users and 100M+ hits.

Matomo’s positioning is explicit on its own pages: 100% data ownership, no data sampling, consent-free tracking, and an open-source core you can read.

Pricing Comparison

The important thing about that table is that the free columns are not comparable. Google’s free tier is free because Google is selling advertising. Matomo’s free tier is free because you are supplying the infrastructure. Whichever you pick, somebody is paying, and the question is whether you would rather pay in constraints or in server administration.

The user limits on Matomo’s hosted plans are worth noting if you are coming from Google Analytics, where account access is not a billing dimension. Up to 4 users on Team is tight for an agency relationship, and the step from Team to Business is the largest in the ladder.

When to Choose Google Analytics 4

Choose Google Analytics when your measurement problem is mostly about advertising and mostly about now.

The Google Ads integration is the substantial reason, not an incidental one. Audiences built in Analytics are usable for remarketing. Conversions flow between the products. Attribution across Google channels is reported in one place. If paid search and Performance Max are how you acquire customers, replacing that integration with a third-party tool means rebuilding plumbing that currently works, and the analytics gains have to be large enough to pay for the loss.

The second reason is operational. There is nothing to run. No database to size, no upgrade to schedule, no backup to test, no server to patch at the end of a quarter when everyone is busy. For a small team without a systems person, that is the same argument that makes hosted platforms worth paying for everywhere else in this series, except that here it is also free.

The third is people. Most marketers have used Google Analytics, every setting is documented in a public help centre, and a contractor can be useful on day one. Matomo is documented too, but the number of people who can walk into your account and know what they are looking at is smaller by an order of magnitude, and that has a cost you pay in onboarding rather than in licence fees.

The honest limit is retention, and it is worth being specific. Google’s documentation also notes that if a property becomes XL, event-level retention is automatically reduced to 2 months and older event-level data becomes permanently inaccessible. Standard aggregated reports are not affected by the retention setting, but explorations and funnel reports are, and those are usually where the interesting questions get answered. Read Google’s retention documentation before assuming your historical analysis will still be possible next year.

When to Choose Matomo

Choose Matomo when the data has to be yours, or when you need more history than a standard property will give you.

The compliance case is the clearest. Matomo offers consent-free tracking configuration and extensive privacy options, and the on-premise edition keeps the database on infrastructure you control. For a healthcare provider, a public body, a bank or anyone whose legal team has an opinion about where visitor data may be processed, that is not a feature comparison, it is a requirement, and it ends the discussion.

The retention case is about analysis rather than law. Self-hosted Matomo keeps data as long as you keep it. If your business has seasonality worth measuring across years, or you need to explain a trend that started three years ago, the free edition of Matomo can answer that question and a free Google Analytics property cannot.

Sampling is the third reason, and the one most likely to come up in a meeting. Matomo markets no data sampling as a property of the product. Anyone who has tried to reconcile a sampled report with a database export knows why that matters: once a number is approximate, every number downstream of it is arguable.

The caveat is the server, and it should not be waved away. Self-hosted analytics at real traffic volumes is a database that grows quickly, queries that get slower, upgrades that need testing and backups that need to actually work. That is why Matomo sells Cloud at all, and why the honest comparison for a team with no infrastructure capability is Google Analytics free against Matomo Cloud from 29 per month rather than against the free download.

Where They’re Genuinely Different

The deepest difference is the business model, which determines everything else. Google gives analytics away because analytics makes its advertising better. Matomo charges for hosting and support because the software is the product. That is why Google’s free tier has retention limits and Matomo’s does not, why Matomo’s pricing is published and 360’s is not, and why one of them integrates with an ad platform and the other integrates with your server.

The second difference is where the ceiling sits. Google Analytics is free until it is not enough, and then the next step is a quote. Matomo’s steps are published all the way up, which means you can model the cost of growth before you commit to the platform. Teams that have been surprised by an enterprise analytics quote tend to value that more than teams that have not.

The third is the shape of the work. Running Google Analytics well is a tagging and configuration discipline. Running Matomo well is that plus an infrastructure discipline, or a Cloud subscription to avoid it. Both reward attention and neither is self-driving, but only one of them can break because a disk filled up.

A practical note on running both, which more teams should consider. These tools are not mutually exclusive, and the cost of adding Matomo alongside Google Analytics is a second tag plus a server. Where compliance allows Google Analytics but your analysis needs unsampled history, running both and reconciling them deliberately is more useful than migrating and hoping. Just decide in advance which one is the number you report, because two sources of truth is worse than either one alone.

The Honest Verdict

For most businesses, start with Google Analytics. It is free, the Google Ads integration is genuinely valuable, your team can probably already use it, and there is nothing to maintain. Set the retention to 14 months on day one rather than discovering the 2-month default later, and export to BigQuery if you expect to care about history.

Move to Matomo, or add it, when one of three things is true: your legal position requires data on your own infrastructure, your analysis requires more history than a standard property retains, or sampling has already cost you a decision. Self-host if you have someone who can own a server properly. If you do not, price Matomo Cloud honestly against what the retention and ownership are worth to you, starting from 29 per month excluding tax at low volume and from €230/mo for the Team plan.

The question that settles it is not which tool reports better. It is this: if Google changed its retention rules again next year, would your reporting survive it? If the answer is no and that matters, you are not really choosing an analytics tool, you are choosing who holds your data.