SNOWPLOW OR GOOGLE ANALYTICS?

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

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

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.

Benefit Snowplow
Insights 		Google
Analytics
Full flexibility Custom data structures yes yes (GA4)
Customer success manager yes no
Data collection across unlimited devices (e.g. IoT) yes no
Decoupled data collection and modelling yes yes (GA4)
Incremental and configurable SQL data model yes no
Ingestion of data from 3rd parties and webhooks yes no
Load your data into BigQuery yes yes
Load your data into Snowflake DB and Redshift yes no
Load your data into S3 yes no
Load your data into real-time streams (Kinesis, Pub/Sub) yes no
Real-time data delivery SLAs yes no (GA360)
Real-time data enrichment (1st and 3rd party, and fully configurable) yes no
Unlimited custom properties yes no
Unlimited use cases yes no
Quality assured Cloud outage and data loss protection yes no
Common data format across all platforms yes yes
Data quality console for debugging yes no
Fully observable data pipeline yes no
Local queuing for offline event capture yes no
Proactive data quality alerting yes no
Provides a single source of truth for data mature companies yes no
Real-time validation of data against schemas yes no
Reduces time spent cleaning or wrangling data yes no
Reprocessing of bad data yes no
Unopinionated data yes yes (GA4)
Uptime and latency SLAs yes no (GA360)
Total control 1st party server-set cookies for reliable user tracking on Safari yes no
Built on an open standard yes no
Complete data ownership yes no
Control over where your data is processed yes no
Data is trusted by data, product and marketing teams yes no
Framework for writing unit tests against your tracking yes no
Modern ad blocker circumvention yes no
Server-side tracking yes no
Support for data structure and data schema evolution yes no
Support for fully anonymous tracking yes no
Support for pseudonymizing data yes no
Zero vendor lock-in yes no

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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