Switching from GA4
Leaving GA4 without
losing the plot.
GA4 collects almost everything and explains almost nothing. Here is what actually changes if you move to Coruve — and the handful of jobs GA4 still does better, named rather than buried.
What changes in the first week
Everything below is live in Coruve today. Anything still being built is marked, and marked things are never counted as a reason to switch.
01
No cookie banner.
Coruve's tracker writes no cookies at all — not one, not first-party — and it stores no raw IP addresses. It also respects Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control automatically.
02
The reports are already built.
Overview, pages, sources and campaigns, UTM breakdowns, locations, devices, sessions, entry and exit pages, events, journeys and AI traffic each have their own screen. Every one of them will compare your range against the one before it, and every ranked row carries its own bounce and conversion rate — withheld, with the reason on the cell, when the row is too thin to support one. There is no property to configure, no data stream to wire up, and no exploration to assemble first.
03
Click any row to filter everything.
Countries, devices, browsers, channels, sources, pages and UTM values all work as filters across every report, and the filters live in the URL so you can send someone the exact view you are looking at.
04
Goals count backwards.
Create a goal today and Coruve computes it against the history it has already collected, so you find out whether it works now instead of next month.
05
A Brief written in sentences.
Coruve looks for anomalies against each metric's own baseline and writes up what moved, with the numbers it used. It advances daily on Starter and above; on Free it moves once a week, on the Monday. You can ask a chart to explain a change it shows, and ask Coruve plain questions in writing — 3 a day on Free, 50 on Starter.
06
A catalogue of everything clickable.
Coruve catalogues the buttons, links and forms people actually use, gives each one a readable name, and offers that list wherever an event is needed. Putting a goal on a button is three clicks, and you never type an event name anywhere — so there is no tagging plan to write before your first answer.
07
CSV export from the reports you have.
Every report your plan includes has a CSV export behind it, on every plan including the free one. The only reports without one are the ones your plan does not carry.
08
AI crawlers counted apart from AI visitors.
GA4's AI Assistants channel tells you how many people an assistant sent you; it does not tell you which assistants are fetching your pages. Coruve reports both and never adds them together.
09
Bring your GA4 history across.coming soon
Not available yet. When it ships, a year-on-year comparison will still work after you switch: imported history is stored separately and always labelled as GA4's numbers, never merged into Coruve's.
Head to head
Only rows we could check are here. Where GA4 is ahead, the row says so rather than quietly omitting it — you cannot weigh a trade nobody showed you.
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, so there is no consent gate in front of your measurement.
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 Assistants channel in its default channel group, covering arrivals from ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok. It is referrer-based, and it excludes Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- Coruve
- The same referrer-based count, plus whether those visitors convert compared with your other channels as a built-in panel (Starter and above). If you import your GA4 history, Google's own AI Assistants rows come across labelled as GA4's.
AI crawlers fetching your pages
- GA4
- Not reported. GA4's AI channel counts people, not the bots that come to read your site.
- Coruve
- Reported separately from AI-assisted humans, named per assistant, so the two are never added together. Honest caveat: only crawlers that run JavaScript can be counted this way, and most do not.
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.
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 5 August 2026 against Google's data-retention documentation, Google's default channel group reference. 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 most of it argues for leaving GA4 running beside Coruve rather than for cancelling the move, because none of it is the thing that brought you to this page.
- You spend real money on Google Ads. Audience sharing and conversion import between GA4 and Ads are ad-platform plumbing, they have no equivalent here, and closing that gap is not on our roadmap.
- Your traffic is large and your budget is zero. GA4 has no volume ceiling; our Free plan stops at 10,000 events a month — which is also why leaving GA4 running costs you nothing while you decide.
- You have a mobile app. Coruve measures the web, and only the web — the depth in the table above is what that focus buys.
- Your analyst lives in BigQuery. GA4's free raw-event export beats CSV files and a read API outright, and anyone who writes SQL will feel it.
- 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, which is a cost on day one and nothing after it.
- You need query-level search data. That comes from Search Console, we do not report it, and Search Console is free and opens in the next tab either way.
What switching actually looks like
- 1
Add the snippet next to GA4, not instead of it
Coruve's tracker is 7.3 KB on the wire and installs with one script tag. Leave GA4 running. There is no reason to make this a one-way door on day one.
- 2
Expect the two numbers to disagree
They will, and it is not a bug in either tool. GA4 groups visits into sessions differently and filters bots differently, so a visitor count that matched exactly would be the surprising outcome. Compare the shape and the trend, not the decimal.
- 3
Create one goal and let it look backwards
Pick the single action that matters — a signup, a checkout, a contact form — and make it a goal. Coruve computes it against the traffic it has already recorded, so you get a real answer immediately rather than an empty chart.
- 4
Turn GA4 off when nobody misses it
Give it a month of both. If your team has stopped opening GA4 and nothing on the list above applies to you, remove the tag. If they haven't, keep it — we would rather you kept both than talked yourself out of something you use.
Try it beside what you already have
Run both for a week and compare. The Free plan is the trial — one snippet, real data, no credit card.