Coruve vs Google Analytics 4
One is free. The other
answers the question.
GA4 collects almost everything and explains almost nothing. Coruve costs money and tells you what moved, with no consent banner standing in front of the numbers. Every row below names the trade, including the ones GA4 takes.
The short answer
Here is the case for Coruve, and beside it the reader we would send to GA4 instead. Both are on this page rather than buried in it, so you can tell inside a minute whether this is your tool.
Choose Coruve if
- You want your numbers to stop depending on how many visitors press “accept”. Coruve writes no cookies, so nothing sits in front of the measurement.
- You are tired of building an exploration before you can see an answer. The reports are already there.
- You want to know not just that ChatGPT sent you visitors, but whether those visitors convert.
- You want a goal you create today to count backwards over the traffic you have already collected.
- You would rather read a paragraph about what changed than reconstruct it from four charts.
When GA4 is the better call
- You spend real money on Google Ads. Sharing audiences and conversions between GA4 and Ads is ad-platform plumbing, and it has no equivalent here.
- Your traffic is large and your budget is zero. GA4 has no practical volume ceiling; our free plan stops at 10,000 events a month.
- You have a mobile app. Coruve measures the web, and only the web.
- Your reporting lives in BigQuery. GA4's free raw-event export is a real advantage over CSV files and a read API for anyone who writes SQL.
- You hand your site to agencies or contractors. They will all know GA4 already; ours is a tool you would have to introduce them to.
Head to head
Only rows we could check are here, and where GA4 is ahead the row says so rather than quietly omitting it — you cannot weigh a trade nobody showed you. Four of the ten below are marked as GA4's edge.
Cost
Their edge- GA4
- Free, with no practical volume ceiling.
- Coruve
- Free up to 10,000 events a month, then $19/month for 100,000. GA4 is free and we are not; what you are buying is the rest of this table.
Cookies and consent
- GA4
- Uses cookies, so most sites in the EU and UK put it behind a consent banner. Your numbers then depend on how many people press accept.
- Coruve
- No cookies at all — not first-party either. No raw IP address is stored, and Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are respected automatically. There is no consent gate in front of your measurement.
What you do on day one
- GA4
- Create a property, wire up a data stream, then build an exploration before most questions have an answer.
- Coruve
- Add one script tag. Overview, pages, sources, campaigns, locations, devices, sessions, entry and exit pages, events, journeys and AI traffic each already have their own screen.
Goals you create today
- GA4
- A conversion event starts counting from the moment you define it.
- Coruve
- Computed against the history already collected, so you find out whether it works now instead of next month.
How long your event-level data lives
- GA4
- Standard properties can keep event-level data for 2 or 14 months. Longer windows are an Analytics 360 feature.
- Coruve
- Days of history: Free 30, Starter 365, Pro 730, Growth 1,095. Enforced by the database — expired rows are deleted, not hidden.
Visitors sent by AI assistants
- GA4
- Has an AI Assistant channel in its default channel group, announced 13 May 2026. The channel is set from the medium and campaign values written when the traffic arrives, and Google has not documented any reclassification of data collected before that date. Google's channel reference names ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok; AI Overviews and AI Mode are excluded by Google's own wording, and report under organic search instead.
- Coruve
- The same referrer-driven count, against a list we publish by name — the post below enumerates every host — plus whether those visitors convert compared with your other channels (Starter and above).
AI crawlers fetching your pages
- GA4
- Not reported. The AI Assistant channel counts people an assistant sent, not the bots that come to read your site.
- Coruve
- Reported separately from AI-assisted humans, named per assistant, and never added to them. Honest caveat: only crawlers that run JavaScript can be counted this way, and most do not — which is true of every script-tag analytics tool, including GA4.
Google Ads and Search Console
Their edge- GA4
- Shares audiences and conversions with Google Ads, and joins up with Search Console for query data.
- Coruve
- Neither, and neither is planned — we measure your site rather than manage your ad account. If you buy Google Ads seriously, keep GA4 for that and run us beside it.
Raw event export
Their edge- GA4
- Streams raw events into BigQuery, free, for anyone who wants to run their own SQL.
- Coruve
- CSV from every report your plan includes, and a read API of 35 datasets from Pro and above. That is not the same thing as raw event streaming.
Mobile apps
Their edge- GA4
- Covers iOS and Android through Firebase alongside web.
- Coruve
- Web only.
GA4 facts checked on 29 August 2026 against Google's default channel group reference, Google's data-retention documentation, Google's data-thresholding documentation, Google's sampling documentation, Google's BigQuery export limits. Products change; if you find something out of date here, tell us and we will fix it.
The honest part
What GA4 does well — and the trade
GA4 is free, it is everywhere, and it is genuinely good at the jobs Google built it for. Here is what you would be trading — and read it carefully, because most of it argues for running the two side by side rather than for staying put. None of these is the thing that brought you to this page.
- It is free at any volume, and that is not a small thing. It is also the reason there is no cost to leaving GA4 running while you decide.
- Google Ads integration is the strongest single reason to keep it, and closing that gap is not on our roadmap. It is ad-platform plumbing rather than analysis, and it is Google's to do well.
- Its raw BigQuery export beats CSV files and a read API outright. If you have somebody who writes SQL, you will feel the difference; if you do not, an export you cannot query is not an answer.
- It measures mobile apps through Firebase. Coruve measures the web, and only the web — the depth in the table above is what that focus buys.
- Every agency, contractor and freelancer already knows it. Ours is a tool you would have to introduce them to, which is a cost on day one and nothing after it.
- Query-level search data comes from Search Console, and we do not report it. Search Console is free and sits perfectly well beside us — that is an argument for keeping it, not for keeping GA4's reports.
The one difference that isn’t a feature-list row
Most rows above are the ordinary business of comparing two analytics tools. This one is different, because it is the row where both products changed recently and most of the advice written about it is out of date.
GA4 does have an AI channel now.
Nearly every article ranking for this question still says it does not, and walks you through building your own. That has been wrong since 13 May 2026. If you use GA4, check for the AI Assistant channel before you build anything — we would rather tell you that than let you waste an afternoon.
It classifies on arrival, and the list behind it is private.
The channel comes from a medium and campaign written as the traffic lands, and Google has not documented any reclassification of what it collected before May. Google's reference also names five assistants without publishing the complete list — so you cannot check which are covered, or notice the day that changes.
Counting people is not the same as counting crawlers.
GA4's channel tells you how many visitors an assistant sent. It does not tell you which assistants are fetching your pages to read them. Coruve reports both, names each one, and never adds the two together — because they answer different questions.
The only comparison that counts your traffic
Run Coruve beside GA4 for a week and read both. The Free plan is the trial — one snippet, real data, no credit card.