Comparison
Panel or Google Analytics.
What we will not do, and why. This page is written so you can choose the other tool deliberately, rather than discover it after installing.
In one sentence
Google Analytics is an acquisition tool that needs to recognise a person for months. Panel is an audience counter that cannot, by construction. If your job depends on the first thing, Panel is the wrong product, and we would rather write that here than let you find out in three weeks.
No opinion
The facts, side by side
- SubjectPanelGoogle Analytics 4
Cookies set
Panel
None.
Google Analytics 4
_ga, two years by default.Consent banner
Panel
None: nothing is written to the device.
Google Analytics 4
Required in the EU, because there is terminal storage to consent to.
Script weight
Panel
About 2.5 KB gzipped, one request, no dependencies.
Google Analytics 4
Several tens of kilobytes gzipped, plus whatever the configuration triggers next.
IP address
Panel
Never written to the database, never logged. It feeds the hash and the country lookup, then it is gone.
Google Analytics 4
Received and then, per Google's documentation, not retained. That is not where the difference lies: the cookie does the following, not the IP.
Recognising a visitor tomorrow
Panel
Impossible. The secret that makes the identifier is destroyed every night.
Google Analytics 4
Yes, up to fourteen months on the default settings.
Where the data lives
Panel
One server in Germany, inside the European Union.
Google Analytics 4
Google's infrastructure, with transfers outside the EU that several European authorities have had to rule on.
Sampling
Panel
None. Everything that arrives is counted.
Google Analytics 4
Explorations are sampled above an event threshold.
The code you serve
Panel
Source map published: you can read exactly what runs on your visitors' machines.
Google Analytics 4
Minified, not documented line by line.
Price
Panel
19 to 99 EUR a month, by number of sites.
Google Analytics 4
Free up to a ceiling, then a negotiated enterprise tier.
These rows describe Google Analytics 4 on its default settings, from Google's public documentation, as of 24 September 2026. If one of them is wrong or has aged, write to us: this page changes the same day. A comparison that overstates is a comparison an attentive reader turns against us.
The case against us
What Google Analytics does that Panel will not.
Almost everything below follows from a single decision: no identifier survives midnight.
Unique visitors over thirty days
We do not return a number: we return "unavailable", with the reason. Adding two days together would count a returning person twice, and the information that would fix it was destroyed on purpose. A confident wrong number is worse than a visible hole in a chart.
Per-person profiles, cohorts, retention
Every one of them needs an identifier that survives from one week to the next. That is exactly what this product is built not to have, so it is not on the roadmap — not now and not later.
Funnels that span several days
A journey inside one session is measurable and is coming. A journey that starts on Tuesday and ends on Thursday is not: from where we stand, those are two people.
Campaign attribution over time
We now read the five
utm_*parameters, so you can see which campaigns brought visits — on the day they arrived. What we cannot do is credit a campaign with a purchase made three weeks later: that needs an identifier linking the two visits, and ours is destroyed every night. If your reporting is built on multi-week attribution, this is the row that decides it.Tracking across several domains
The identifier is derived from the site as much as from the visitor, so the same person on two of your domains is two visitors. That is a direct consequence of one site being unable to recognise another's.
The Google integrations
Google Ads, Search Console, BigQuery, advertising audiences: none of it. If your reporting sits on top of those, the cost of moving is not in Panel, it is there.
Demographics and interests
Age, gender, affinity categories: that data comes from Google's advertising graph, not from your site. We will never have it, and we will not try to guess it.
Hash routes
#/cartis not followed automatically, because counting it would mean sending the fragment. One explicit call from your router fixes it, but it is a line of code the other tool does not ask you for.
The case for us
What Panel does that Google Analytics cannot.
Your visitors see no banner
Not because we found a favourable reading of the text, but because there is no terminal storage to consent to. Nothing is placed on the device. That is a property of the code, checkable in the file we serve.
No number is estimated
No sampling, no conversion modelling, no gap filling. When we do not know, we say so instead of producing a plausible value.
The IP is not anonymised: it is never written
The difference is real. "Anonymised" assumes data received, processed and then transformed by a policy. Here there is no column, no log line and no backup that holds it — so there is nothing to misconfigure on a Tuesday.
What breaks your numbers is shown to you
The other scripts on your page, and whether one of them had already wrapped
history.pushState. Nobody tells you this, because it is invisible from a server and because it is almost never the measuring tool's fault.The script weighs about 2.5 KB
One request, no dependencies, loaded with
defer. On a phone over 3G, that is the difference between a line in your performance budget and an item of spending.A stolen key reads nothing
The collector answers 204 to everybody and never confirms that a key exists. A public key lets somebody send noise into your account, never read anything out of it, and it is revoked in one click.
Deciding
How to choose in ten seconds.
You need to know how many distinct people came this month, and that number commits a budget.
Take Google Analytics, or another tool that sets a persistent identifier — and its banner with it.
Your reporting already lives in Google Ads or in BigQuery.
Stay where you are. The cost of moving is in your integrations, not in the measuring tool.
You want to know which pages work, where the traffic comes from and what is happening right now — and never think about a consent banner again.
That is exactly what Panel does, and all that it does.
You are still undecided.
Both can run on the same page for a month. The numbers will not match, and the gap itself is informative: the install page explains where it comes from.
Measure your traffic without asking for anything.
One script tag, no consent banner, and a server in the European Union. Your first page view appears within seconds.
No commitment. No qualification call.
The whole install
<script defer
src="https://panel.raicode.tech/v1/p.js"
data-panel-key="pk_live_…"></script>