Coruve vs Google Analytics 4
One is free. The other
answers the question.
GA4 costs nothing and collects almost everything. Coruve costs money and explains what moved. Below is the comparison with the awkward rows left in — starting with the readers who should close this tab and keep GA4.
The short answer
Most comparison pages published by a vendor conclude that the vendor wins. This one starts with the case for GA4, because for a good number of readers that is the right answer and you should not have to scroll to find it.
Choose GA4 if
- You spend real money on Google Ads. Sharing audiences and conversions between GA4 and Ads has no equivalent here and never will.
- 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 nothing else.
- Your reporting lives in BigQuery. GA4's free raw-event export is a genuine advantage over CSV files and a read API.
- You hand your site to agencies or contractors. They will all know GA4 already; nobody has heard of us yet.
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.
Head to head
Only rows we could check are here, and where GA4 is ahead the row says so rather than quietly omitting it. Four of the ten below are marked as GA4 wins.
Cost
GA4 wins- GA4
- Free, with no practical volume ceiling.
- Coruve
- Free up to 10,000 events a month, then $19/month for 100,000. We are not going to pretend this row is close.
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
GA4 wins- GA4
- Shares audiences and conversions with Google Ads, and joins up with Search Console for query data.
- Coruve
- Neither, and neither is planned. If you buy Google Ads seriously, this row alone is a reason to keep GA4.
Raw event export
GA4 wins- 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
GA4 wins- 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
Where GA4 is better
GA4 is free, it is everywhere, and it is genuinely good at things we are not attempting. If any of the following describes you, staying put — or running both — is the right answer, and we would rather say so than win the signup.
- It is free at any volume. That is not a small thing, and no feature list on our side changes it.
- Google Ads integration is the strongest single reason to stay, and it is not a gap we intend to close.
- Its raw BigQuery export is a genuine advantage over CSV files and a read API, and anyone comfortable with SQL will feel the difference.
- It measures mobile apps through Firebase. We measure the web and nothing else.
- Every agency, contractor and freelancer already knows it. Ours is a tool you would have to introduce them to.
- Query-level search data comes from Search Console and stays inside Google's own tools. We have no answer to that at all.
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.