Google Analytics 4 is free, installed on a huge share of the web, and backed by the biggest advertising business on earth. Matomo is the leading open source alternative, and Node runs it as a fully managed service on UK infrastructure. Since one of these costs money and the other does not, this is not a price-per-seat comparison: it is a comparison of what "free" actually buys, and what paying a flat fee gets you instead. Here is the honest version.

What free actually buys

GA4 costs nothing in cash because it is part of an advertising ecosystem: it exists to make Google Ads measurable, and your visitors' interactions flow through Google's infrastructure under Google's terms. That is not a scandal, it is the deal, but it is a deal, and it comes with product limits that only bite once you depend on the data.

At the time of writing, GA4's free tier keeps user-level and event-level data for a maximum of 14 months, and its exploration reports sample results once a query covers more than 10 million events. The paid answer to both is Google Analytics 360. Google does not publish a price for it: it is sold through sales teams and partners, with publicly reported entry pricing around $50,000 a year (Google prices in USD). The gap between £0 and that figure is exactly where Matomo sits.

Matomo on Node is a flat rate-card fee: at the time of writing £22 a month for the Small tier, £38 for Medium (which typically suits sites with up to a few million pageviews a month) and £70 for Large, billed hourly with no minimum term, with current figures on the pricing page. There is no per-hit licence and no sampling: you hold the complete dataset in your own database and you decide how long it is kept.

GA4 and Matomo side by side

Google Analytics 4 Matomo on Node
Price Free; Analytics 360 is unpublished, reported from around $50,000 a year at the time of writing Flat fee from £22 a month at the time of writing, see pricing
Data ownership Google processes your visitor data on its terms Your database, your tenant, your retention policy
Data location Google's global infrastructure UK infrastructure you control
Sampling Explorations sample beyond the free tier's per-query event threshold None: every report queries the full dataset
Retention 14 months maximum for user-level data on the free tier You choose; raw data kept as long as you want
Consent position Consent generally required; hard to fit the UK's statistical exception when data feeds advertising features Can be configured first-party, cookieless and aggregate to fit the shape of the exception
Ads integration Native to Google Ads: conversions, audiences, bidding Campaign tracking and APIs, but no native Google Ads loop
Advanced features Free tier is capable; some depth reserved for 360 Core platform is complete; some extras (heatmaps, funnels) are paid add-ons, and we will tell you which before you commit

This is the area to get right, and the ground moved in 2026. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 amended PECR, and from 5 February 2026 UK law includes a statistical purposes exception to the analytics consent requirement, with the ICO's final guidance on storage and access technologies published on 29 April 2026. The exception is narrow: it covers technologies whose sole purpose is collecting statistical information about how your own service is used, in order to improve it. It does not cover advertising measurement or attribution, profiling, or cross-site tracking, and it removes the consent box, not the transparency duty: visitors must still be told, and given a simple, free way to object.

A self-hosted, first-party Matomo configured for aggregate statistics, with IP anonymisation on and cross-site features off, is the kind of deployment that exception describes. A typical GA4 setup is much harder to bring inside it, because the data is processed by Google and is commonly wired into advertising signals and audiences, which the guidance excludes. France's CNIL runs a comparable audience-measurement exemption and has identified Matomo as a solution that can be configured to operate without consent under its conditions; Google Analytics is not on that list, and Matomo now ships a one-click check against the CNIL configuration.

To be plain about the limits of this: whether your deployment qualifies under either regime is your assessment, not our promise. What we do is configure the tracking mode to match the position you choose, and document the configuration so your data protection officer can defend it.

When Google Analytics is the right choice

Fair is fair. If the analytics budget is zero, GA4 is a remarkable free product and the trade-offs may be entirely acceptable for a small site. If your marketing is built on Google Ads, GA4's native conversion import, audience sharing and bidding integration have no true Matomo equivalent, and that loop may be worth more than data ownership. If your team, agencies and hires all speak GA4, the ecosystem of skills and the free BigQuery export are real assets. None of that is spin, and if it describes you, GA4 is the rational choice.

When Matomo wins

Consent and the cookie banner: if you want analytics that can run first-party, cookieless and aggregate, inside the shape of the UK's new statistical exception rather than behind a consent wall that most visitors dismiss, Matomo is built for exactly that configuration.

Complete, unsampled data: no 14-month ceiling, no sampled explorations. The raw dataset is yours, at any traffic volume, for as long as you decide to keep it.

Regulated and public-sector work: when a data protection officer asks where the data is, who processes it and under what agreement, "our own database in a UK tenant under an Article 28 DPA" is a short answer. The European Commission's own web analytics service is based on Matomo for the same reason.

Owning the asset: analytics history is a business record. In your own database it can be queried, joined to your other data and taken with you; inside a vendor's free tier it is a view Google grants you.

Analytics data that never leaves your control

The structural difference between the two products is who processes the data. With GA4, your visitors' behaviour is processed by Google, on Google's infrastructure, under terms you do not set. With Matomo on Node, nothing about your visitors is processed by anyone for their own purposes: the data lands in a database inside your own isolated tenant, on hardware we own in a UK datacentre, under UK jurisdiction and a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement with a published sub-processor list. The engineers who operate it are named, and their administrative actions are logged. Departure is an export, not a negotiation, which is our standing position on open source.

Migrating from Google Analytics

Matomo maintains a Google Analytics Importer that connects to the GA4 reporting API and imports historical report data for a property, either as a one-off historic import up to a cut-over date or as a rolling import that keeps pulling from GA4 while both systems run in parallel. Node runs the import, deploys the new tracking (Matomo includes its own tag manager), and typically runs Matomo alongside GA4 for a period so you can compare numbers before switching off the old tags. One deadline worth respecting: GA4's free tier retains user-level data for at most 14 months, so detail beyond that window is already gone, and the sooner the import runs, the more of your history survives.

The bottom line

GA4 is free, capable and deeply integrated with Google's advertising stack; if that is your world, keep it. Matomo costs a flat £22 to £70 a month as a managed service and in exchange the complete, unsampled dataset sits on UK infrastructure you control, with a consent story that fits the law as it now stands rather than fighting it. See Hosting for Matomo for what the managed service includes, and open source alternatives to SaaS for the wider catalogue.

Frequently asked questions

Can we import our Google Analytics data into Matomo?

Yes. Matomo's Google Analytics Importer connects to the GA4 reporting API and imports historical report data for a property, either as a one-off historic import or a rolling import that keeps pulling GA4 data while you run both in parallel. Node runs the import and the tracking swap so measurement continues without a gap. Worth knowing: GA4's free tier keeps user-level data for at most 14 months, so the sooner you import, the more detail survives.

Does Matomo need a cookie consent banner in the UK?

Since February 2026, UK law includes a statistical purposes exception to the PECR consent rule: analytics that solely collect information about how your own service is used, to improve it, can run without consent, provided visitors are told and given a simple, free way to object. The ICO's April 2026 guidance excludes advertising measurement, profiling and cross-site tracking from the exception. A first-party, self-hosted Matomo configured for aggregate statistics is the kind of setup the exception describes; whether your configuration qualifies is your assessment to make, and we configure and document the deployment to support it.

Is Matomo free? What does it actually cost?

The software is open source and free; running it well is not. A managed Matomo deployment from Node is a flat rate-card fee, at the time of writing £22 a month for the Small tier, £38 for Medium and £70 for Large, billed hourly, covering hosting on UK infrastructure, upgrades, backups, monitoring and performance tuning. GA4 costs £0 in cash, so what you are buying with Matomo is ownership, unsampled data and a cleaner consent position, not a saving.

When is Google Analytics the better choice?

When the budget for analytics is genuinely zero and the trade-offs are acceptable, when your marketing runs on Google Ads and you need its native conversion and audience integration, or when your team and agencies already work fluently in GA4 and BigQuery. Those are real advantages and we will not pretend otherwise.

What does managed Matomo hosting include?

Deployment on UK infrastructure, upgrades and security patching, daily backups, monitoring, database performance tuning as traffic grows, the tracking and consent configuration to match your privacy position, and single sign-on through your own identity realm. You get the reports; we run the platform.

Where does the analytics data live, and who can process it?

In a database inside your own isolated tenant on hardware Node owns in a UK datacentre, under UK jurisdiction and a UK GDPR Article 28 data processing agreement. No third party processes it for its own purposes, nothing is transferred to another country, and you can query, export or delete the raw data whenever you choose.