A private alternative to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is free, powerful and almost everywhere. It is also a cookie-based product built to feed an ad network, which is why it needs a consent banner and a 135 KB script before it can tell you how many people read your post. Motion Analytics answers the same everyday questions without any of that.
| AT A GLANCE | Motion Analytics | Google Analytics 4 |
|---|---|---|
| Cookies | None | First-party (_ga) |
| Consent banner | Not required | Required across the EU |
| Tracking script | 2.8 KB gzipped | ~135 KB gzipped |
| Funded by | Subscriptions | Advertising |
| Your data | Yours, recorded at the edge | Processed by Google |
| Counts | Exact, sampled at high volume | Sampled past 10M events a query |
| Setup | One script tag | Tag, events, often Tag Manager |
| Free tier | 25k pageviews a month | Free, ad-funded |
| Performance grades | Yes, MotionScore | No |
| Performance CI gate | Yes, MotionScore Guard | No |
| API and MCP | REST and MCP for agents | Data API, no MCP |
| Open source | No | No |
Most sites do not need most of GA4
GA4 is built for marketing teams running paid acquisition across Google's ad products. Multi-touch attribution, audience building, BigQuery exports: there is a lot in there, and for a team that lives in Google Ads it earns its keep.
For everyone else it is depth you never touch, wrapped in an interface that genuinely takes a course to learn. Most people open an analytics tool to answer four questions. How many people came, where from, what did they look at, and what did they click. Motion Analytics is built around those four questions and not much else, so there is nothing to configure before the numbers make sense.
No cookies, so no banner
GA4 sets first-party cookies to recognise returning visitors, which is what puts it inside the scope of the EU cookie rules and means a compliant install needs a consent prompt before it can track. Every visitor who declines leaves a hole that GA4 then fills with modelled estimates.
Motion Analytics sets no cookies and stores no persistent identifier. A returning visitor is recognised for a single day through a hash of their IP and user agent salted with a random value that is generated fresh each day and destroyed within 48 hours, so nobody can be followed from one day to the next, let alone across sites. There is no consent gap to model because there is nothing to consent to. Several European regulators ruled against Google Analytics over US data transfers in 2022; the 2023 EU–US Data Privacy Framework has since changed that picture and it remains contested. The cookie banner, though, is not contested. You need one for GA4 and you do not need one for us.
It is yours, and it stays at the edge
Your GA4 data is processed by Google, and Google is an advertising company. That is not a scandal, it is the deal: the product is free because the data has value to the people who run it.
Motion Analytics is paid for by subscriptions, so there is no second customer for your numbers. Pageviews are recorded by a Cloudflare Worker, frequently in the same data centre that served the page, and they stay there. We sell you a dashboard, not your audience.
What Google Analytics does better
If you run serious paid acquisition, GA4 plugs straight into Google Ads, builds remarketing audiences, and exports raw events to BigQuery for whatever analysis you can write SQL for. Nothing here replaces that, and we are not trying to.
It is also free at a billion events a month, which we are not. If your budget is zero and your traffic is enormous, that is a real reason to stay, banner and all.
If you need to wire conversions back into Google Ads or run your own queries over raw events, stay on GA4. If you mostly want to know what people read, where they came from and what they clicked, without a banner, a heavy script or a BigQuery tutorial, that is exactly what this is for. The live demo is the real dashboard pointed at motion.dev's own traffic, so you can judge it on real numbers before you install anything.