# Alternatives to Universal Analytics

GA3 — replaced by GA4. Universal Analytics has been discontinued; the active alternatives listed here are maintained products you can switch to.

None of its 12 checklist rows are verified yet.

Source: https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/universal-analytics/
Category: Web analytics

## Overview

- **Who it's for**: Website and app owners and marketers who needed to track visitor behavior using Google's original free web analytics platform, prior to the shift to event-based measurement.
- **What you get**: Universal Analytics (GA3) measured traffic in sessions and pageviews using the analytics.js/gtag.js tracking code and first-party cookies. It offered standard reports on audience demographics, acquisition channels, site content, and goal/e-commerce conversions, plus custom dimensions, segments, and views (including filtered and rollup views). Data could be exported to Google Ads, Google Sheets, and BigQuery (360 only) for further analysis.
- **How it works**: Site owners added a tracking snippet to their pages, which sent pageview and event hits to Google's servers each time a user interacted with the site. Google processed these hits into sessions and users, organized under Analytics accounts, properties, and views, and surfaced the results in the Reporting interface. Google stopped processing new data in standard Universal Analytics properties on July 1, 2023 (July 1, 2024 for Analytics 360), transitioning users to Google Analytics 4.

## Profile

- **Status**: discontinued (verified 2026-07-11)

## Ranked alternatives

| # | App | Alt Score | Licence | Platforms |
|---|-----|-----------|---------|-----------|
| 1 | [Fathom](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/fathom.md) | building | Proprietary | Web |
| 2 | [Google Analytics](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/google-analytics.md) | building | Proprietary | Web |
| 3 | [Matomo](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/matomo.md) | building | GPL-3.0 | Web |
| 4 | [Microsoft Clarity](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/microsoft-clarity.md) | building | ? | Web |
| 5 | [Mixpanel](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/mixpanel.md) | building | Proprietary | Web |
| 6 | [Pirsch](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/pirsch.md) | building | AGPL-3.0 | Web |
| 7 | [Plausible](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/plausible.md) | building | AGPL-3.0 | Web |
| 8 | [PostHog](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/posthog.md) | building | MIT | Web |
| 9 | [Simple Analytics](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/simple-analytics.md) | building | Proprietary | Web |
| 10 | [Umami](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/umami.md) | building | MIT | Web |

Alt Score = Verified coverage (90%) + Visibility (10%). See https://altcatalog.com/how-alt-score-works/

## Sources

Sources for Universal Analytics. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.

- **Status**: discontinued — <https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11583528> (verified 2026-07-11)
  - Quote: “Google Analytics 4 is our next-generation measurement solution, and it has replaced Universal Analytics.”

---
Ranked by verified data, never by who paid. https://altcatalog.com/trust/