Google Analytics alternative

Cookieless, no consent banner, and no dashboard to open. Here is the honest version of the comparison, including where Google Analytics is still the right answer.

What Google Analytics does well

It is free, it is comprehensive, and it is the industry default. If you run paid acquisition, GA is wired into the ad platforms in ways nothing else is, and campaign attribution across Google Ads is genuinely hard to replace. If you have a marketing team, they already know it, and any agency you hire will expect it.

That is not faint praise. For a company spending money on ads and employing people to read reports, GA is the correct tool and this page is not for you.

Where it stops fitting

Google Analytics sets cookies, which means a consent banner in the EU and the UK. The first thing a visitor sees is a dialog asking permission to measure them, and everyone who declines is missing from your numbers.

The deeper mismatch is who it is designed for. GA4 assumes someone whose job is to open it, build a report and interpret the result. If you are one person shipping a side project, that person is you, at the end of a day you spent writing code. Most of the time you do not open it. The data is complete and nobody is reading it.

What Staats does instead

There is no dashboard. You connect Staats to your coding agent once, over the Model Context Protocol, and ask questions where you are already working. Three things follow from building it that way round:

It remembers your project. Staats stores what each site is for, what your funnel steps mean, and what every event tracks, so a question three weeks later does not start from a blank slate.

It knows what you shipped. Your agent tags each deploy with its commit and the routes it touched, then compares traffic before and after that exact change, and tells you when the difference is too small to trust.

It speaks before you ask. Unusual days, first-time referrers and pages whose share jumped are surfaced on their own, rather than waiting for you to go looking.

The tracker is around 1.5KB, sets no cookies and stores nothing on the visitor's device. Country comes from the browser timezone rather than an IP lookup, so there is nothing to consent to.

What you give up

No dashboard. That is the product decision, not an unfinished feature. If you want to look at charts, you will not enjoy this.

No ad platform attribution. Staats records UTM parameters but is not wired into Google Ads and will not do multi-touch attribution across paid channels.

No historical import. Your GA history stays in GA. Staats counts from the day you install the tag.

It is new and it is small. Google Analytics is not going anywhere. Weigh that honestly.

Running both

You do not have to choose on day one. The Staats tag is one line and does not conflict with the GA snippet, so run both for a few weeks and see whether you ever open GA again. If you do, you have your answer.

Create a free account and paste the snippet. The free plan covers side projects and there is no card required.