Free and powerful, or simple and focused
Google Analytics 4 costs nothing and connects to the whole Google marketing stack. Revenue arrives when you send purchase events yourself, through gtag or Tag Manager. DataBull connects to Stripe, Polar or Dodo and gets every payment, renewal and refund from the provider, then credits it to the visit that brought the buyer.
| DataBull | Google Analytics 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | One-time payment, currently $29 (launch price, rising to $99). Lifetime updates. | Free. Analytics 360 is sold through Google sales; no public price. |
| Hosting | Self-hosted on your own Cloudflare account (Workers + D1). One command installs it. | Hosted by Google. |
| Revenue | Stripe, Polar and Dodo Payments, connected with a key. Past sales import; renewals and refunds follow by webhook. | Ecommerce events (purchase, refund, begin_checkout…) that you send with gtag or Google Tag Manager. No native payment-provider connection. |
| Cookies | Your choice per site: first-party cookies, cookieless, or cookieless until consent. | First-party cookies _ga and _ga_<container-id>, kept for 2 years by default. |
| Data retention | You choose: 30 days to forever (the default). Payments are never deleted automatically. | Event data for explorations: up to 14 months (up to 50 months on 360). |
| Learning curve | One dashboard: sources, pages, revenue, funnels, realtime. | Very capable, with explorations, audiences and predictive metrics to learn. |
What DataBull does differently
- No ecommerce tagging. Payment links are tagged by the script; server checkouts pass two metadata fields. See the code.
- AI traffic gets its own channel: ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, next to search and social.
- Readable Direct and in-app browsers (Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Telegram…) credited to the app.
- Your data in your Cloudflare account, kept as long as you choose.
When Google Analytics is the better choice
- You run Google Ads and want conversions, audiences and bidding signals to flow between them.
- You need BigQuery export, app plus web measurement or predictive metrics.
- Your budget for analytics is exactly zero.
- A team already knows GA4 and has reports built on it. Many sites run both: GA4 for ads, DataBull for revenue by source.
Competitor details as of October 2026, from their public pages: Google Marketing Platform, GA4 limits, GA4 cookies, GA4 ecommerce. Prices and plans change; check the source before you decide. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.