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Catalog Web analytics Universal Analytics
Discontinued Universal Analytics was discontinued in July 2023. The alternatives below are active products you can switch to. All discontinued →

Alternatives to Universal Analytics

GA3 — replaced by GA4

None of its 12 checklist rows are verified yet.

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

Most compared with FathomGoogle AnalyticsMatomo
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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.

Why people leave Universal Analytics

Dashed reasons are sourced facts; the rest are opinions. Vendors can dispute.

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Ranked alternatives

Ordered by Alt Score. Click any score to see the breakdown.

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01

Privacy-first analytics without cookies.

Proprietary Web
02

Google's ubiquitous analytics suite.

Proprietary Web
03

Full-featured self-hostable Google Analytics alternative.

GPL-3.0 Web
04

Free heatmaps and session recordings.

Web
05

Event-based product analytics.

Proprietary Web
06

Cookieless server-side analytics from Germany.

AGPL-3.0 Web
07

Lightweight cookieless analytics from the EU.

AGPL-3.0 Web
08

Product analytics with replay, flags and experiments.

MIT Web
09

Clean privacy-first analytics from the Netherlands.

Proprietary Web
10

Simple, fast, privacy-focused analytics.

MIT Web
Sources & verification 1

Every fact and feature listed for Universal Analytics is verified against its own pages. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.

FAQ

Yes. Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and Mixpanel have a free tier or are fully free. Free-tier limits in the comparison table are verified and dated.

Matomo, Pirsch and Plausible — every license claim links its source.