fivebar vs Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free and does nearly everything. fivebar does less, without cookies, on one page you can read at a glance.

Both group your visits into channels on Google’s own scheme, so the figures broadly line up, and both now have a channel for visits from AI assistants such as ChatGPT. Most of what differs is what Google Analytics does to tell visitors apart, and what you have to build yourself.

No cookies

Google Analytics sets cookies on each visitor, one of them to tell one browser from another across visits, for two years unless a site sets otherwise. Google offers a consent mode for sites that ask first. fivebar sets no cookies and keeps nothing in the visitor’s browser: it counts each visitor once a day, by a code made with a secret that’s replaced at midnight and never kept.

One page to read

fivebar’s dashboard is one page: the figures and a chart, then pages, sources, countries, devices, goals and engagement, each a click from its full list, and nearly any row a filter for the rest. Speed, Errors and Bots are a page each beside it. fivebar counts every pageview, with no sampling, which estimates from part of the data, and no thresholds, which leave rows out.

How fast your pages load

Google Analytics 4 has no report of page speed, and no measure of it among its metrics. Google’s own guide to measuring Core Web Vitals with it has you add a library to your pages, export your events to BigQuery and write the queries. fivebar’s tag already times every page load in your visitors’ own browsers, and the Speed page rates each measure by Google’s thresholds, with the pages that load slowest listed first.

fivebar’s Speed page for djangodocs.dev: six tiles, TTFB, FCP, LCP, INP, CLS and PLT, each rated, then LCP for each day against Google’s thresholds — djangodocs.dev, whose stats are public, from 12 to 18 October 2026. One slow Sunday put its LCP past poor.

Pages that fail

Google Analytics has no report of 404s: you look for your error page’s title among page titles, or send an event of your own. Chrome, Edge and Firefox tell fivebar’s script the status of every page they load, so the Errors page fills itself: which addresses fail, how often, and where their visitors came from, which is how a broken link shows up.

fivebar’s Errors page for djangodocs.dev: 33 errors on 31 pages, a 15% error rate, each a 404, by day, status, source and device — djangodocs.dev answered 33 page loads with a 404 that week, nearly all of them on one Saturday.

The bots it left out

Google Analytics leaves out known bots, and you can’t see how many. fivebar counts everything it leaves out on a Bots page: how many pageviews, which pages, which networks, and why each was taken for a bot, by rules its docs set out.

fivebar’s Bots page for djangodocs.dev: 94 pageviews taken for bots, 30% of them all, by day, and why: a hosting network, an automated browser or a crawler — Nearly a third of djangodocs.dev’s pageviews that week were bots’, most of them from servers.

Asking an app

Google’s MCP server for Google Analytics is marked experimental, reads only, and runs on your own computer: you install it with Python, set up a Google Cloud project with two APIs turned on, and sign in with Google’s command-line tools. Inside Google Analytics there’s Ask Advisor, a Gemini chat, in beta.

fivebar’s MCP server is an address: add https://fiveb.ar/api/mcp to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor or any app that takes one, sign in and choose Allow. The app reads your stats with fivebar’s rules about what they mean, and if you tick a box, adds goals and changes settings when you ask.

Where your stats are kept

Google collects EU and UK visits on servers there, which drop each IP address, then sends them on to Analytics’ own servers, relying on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework to take them to the US. Nothing fivebar keeps is at rest outside the EU, or on a US company’s server, and your stats are on its servers in Germany, at Hetzner (Infrastructure).

Prices

Google Analytics is free. Its paid edition, 360, is sold by contract, through Google or a partner. fivebar’s plans start at $5 a month for 10k pageviews, $50 for a million and $165 for ten (Pricing), each with every feature and up to 1,024 sites.

What Google Analytics has that fivebar doesn’t

Funnels and explorations of every kind.
Ecommerce: purchases, products and revenue.
Google Ads: audiences to advertise to.
BigQuery export of every event.
Apps and websites in one property.
No price, however busy your site.

Switching

Add fivebar’s tag beside Google’s, and run both for a few weeks, so you have both counts for the same days. Expect different visitors: Google counts users, browsers it tells apart by a cookie, across any range, and fivebar each visitor once a day. Where your pages call gtag('event', …), call tally() with the same name and parameters. fivebar can’t bring your Google Analytics history over yet.

Checked on 19 October 2026, on Google’s own pages, each linked where it’s used.