Snowplow or Google Analytics?

Understand the difference between Snowplow and Google Analytics, so you can make the right decision for your business.

Snowplow vs Google analytics

A side-by-side look at the key similarities and differences between Google Analytics and Snowplow BDP

The Google Analytics column covers Google’s analytics products across Firebase (App + Web), Google Analytics 4, Universal Analytics (also known as GA Free), and Google’s enterprise offering – GA360.

BenefitSnowplow
BDP		Google
Analytics
Full flexibilityCustom data structures (GA4)
Customer success manager
Data collection across unlimited devices (e.g. IoT)
Decoupled data collection and modelling (GA4)
Incremental and configurable SQL data model
Ingestion of data from 3rd parties and webhooks
Load your data into BigQuery
Load your data into Snowflake DB and Redshift
Load your data into S3
Load your data into real-time streams (Kinesis, Pub/Sub)
Real-time data delivery SLAs (GA360)
Real-time data enrichment (1st and 3rd party, and fully configurable)
Unlimited custom properties
Unlimited use cases
Quality assuredCloud outage and data loss protection
Common data format across all platforms
Data quality console for debugging
Fully observable data pipeline
Local queuing for offline event capture
Proactive data quality alerting
Provides a single source of truth for data mature companies
Real-time validation of data against schemas
Reduces time spent cleaning or wrangling data
Reprocessing of bad data
Unopinionated data (GA4)
Uptime and latency SLAs (GA360)
Total control1st party server-set cookies for reliable user tracking on Safari
Built on an open standard
Complete data ownership
Control over where your data is processed
Data is trusted by data, product and marketing teams
Framework for writing unit tests against your tracking
Modern ad blocker circumvention
Server-side tracking
Support for data structure and data schema evolution
Support for fully anonymous tracking
Support for pseudonymizing data
Zero vendor lock-in

What Snowplow customers have to say
about Google Analytics

“With GA we don’t really own the data – and that is important.”

“For us, Snowplow event tracking has replaced Google Analytics, as GA cannot do everything we need, or even a fraction of what we need, such as easily tying data to individual users.”

– Alex Beskin, Head of Analytics, Animoto

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Once we got the Snowplow data there was this, “Oh my god!” moment. When we looked at Google Analytics revenue attribution, even if we doubled it, it might total one thing.

But then we got the Snowplow data – which is fuller, richer and takes into account all the different data sources – for the same thing, and it’s a healthy four times higher.

The difference was huge when you started to look at the full customer journey and stitch it all together.

– David Sinton, Co-Founder, Big Tree Online

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Get Snowplow behavioral data management built in to your products today

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