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 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.

	Benefit	Google Analytics
Full flexibility	Custom 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 assured	Cloud 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 control	1st 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

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

Get Snowplow behavioral data management built in to your products today

Try Snowplow Book a demo Request a quote

Snowplow or 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.

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.”

Get Snowplow behavioral data management built in to your products today

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.”