Matomo vs Google Analytics: Hosting, Consent and Cost

Matomo vs Google Analytics is usually a question about control: who holds the data, whether you need a consent banner, and what the free option costs you in limits. Both tools count visits, sources, pages and ecommerce orders. They differ in where the data lives, how they are priced and what each lets you do without asking visitors first, and this comparison sets that out from Matomo's and Google's own pages as read on 16 October 2026.

The short answer: Matomo for control, GA4 for free scale, Arktis for store attribution

Choose Matomo if you want to own the data outright. You can host it yourself for free, or use Matomo Cloud, which stores data in Frankfurt and is priced by monthly hits: from Sweden on 16 October 2026 the page showed SEK 199 a month for 50,000 hits, and the page's own price data lists the same tier at €22 or $26. Choose Google Analytics 4 if you want a free tool that handles large traffic and links directly to Google Ads, and you accept its limits: event data kept for at most 14 months for explorations, sampling above 10 million events per query, and three attribution models.

If you run an online store and the question behind the comparison is which ads and campaigns brought your orders, Arktis is the clear winner. It takes Shopify orders by webhook rather than relying on the browser to report them, captures ad click identifiers on landing, and counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform next to the Meta spend it syncs. Starter is $49 a month, Growth is $149 with session recordings and a 7-day free trial, and Scale is $349.

Key takeaways

Matomo's case rests on ownership: the On-Premise edition is free to run on your own servers, and the Cloud edition keeps data in Germany and has no sampling. Google Analytics 4 is free and scales, but the standard version keeps user and event data for explorations for at most 14 months, can sample large queries, and since November 2023 offers only data-driven and last-click style models. France's regulator, the CNIL, names Matomo as software you can configure to meet its analytics exemption from consent, but Matomo itself advises treating its JavaScript tracker as needing consent in Germany. Neither removes the need to check your own country's rules.

Hosting and data ownership

This is the difference most people come for. Matomo On-Premise runs on infrastructure you choose, so the database sits on servers you control. Matomo Cloud is the hosted edition, and its pricing FAQ says Cloud data is stored in Frankfurt, Germany. The same FAQ says you can move between Cloud and On-Premise, with Matomo importing or exporting the data.

Google Analytics 4 runs only on Google's infrastructure. Data leaves your site for Google, and transfers from the EU to Google in the United States can rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, adopted by the European Commission on 10 July 2023. The General Court upheld that framework on 3 September 2025 in Latombe v Commission, and an appeal, case C-703/25 P, was lodged on 31 October 2025 and was listed as pending on the Court of Justice's InfoCuria database on 16 October 2026. GA4 can be used lawfully in the EU, but the legal footing of the transfer is still being argued.

Price

Google Analytics is free of charge, and Google's product page says so. The paid edition, Google Analytics 360, has higher limits, such as longer retention options and a larger sampling quota; our Google Analytics 360 pricing guide covers what Google publishes about it.

Matomo has two price lists. On-Premise starts with a Community edition that is free forever, with unlimited users and hits. Premium features come as plugin bundles: on 16 October 2026 the page showed Team at 275 € a month for up to 4 users and 5 million hits, Business at 1,450 € and Enterprise at 3,400 €, with an annual option marked as 17 percent cheaper. Those bundle prices were shown in euros from Sweden.

Matomo Cloud is priced by hits, and the price displayed depends on where you are. From Sweden the page showed Swedish kronor; its embedded price data carries euro and dollar figures for the same tiers.

All Cloud prices exclude tax, and the page offers two months free on annual billing. Above the allowance, extra hits are charged in blocks: at the 50,000 tier, 5,000 extra hits cost SEK 20 as shown from Sweden. Matomo's FAQ defines a hit as a single interaction sent to Matomo, such as a pageview, event, download or site search, and says its users track around 3 hits per visit on average. Matomo's FAQ on pre-ingestion filtering adds that bot and internal traffic count towards the quota unless they are excluded before they are recorded.

As an example, take a store with 30,000 visits a month. At about 3 hits a visit that is roughly 90,000 hits, so the 100,000 tier, SEK 359 a month from Sweden. Ecommerce and event tracking push the hit count higher.

Consent and privacy

Under the ePrivacy rules, storing or reading information on a visitor's device needs consent unless it is needed to transmit a communication or strictly necessary for a service the visitor asked for, and analytics is usually neither. France's regulator has set out the best-known exception for analytics. The CNIL's guidance says audience measurement cookies can be exempt from consent if they are used only for audience measurement or A/B testing, the data is not combined with other processing, the tracker covers a single site, the last byte of the IP address is removed, the tracker lifetime is limited to 13 months, and visitors are told and can object. It adds that most large audience measurement offerings do not fall within the exemption, and names Matomo as open source software you can configure yourself.

Matomo's own FAQ is careful about that. It says a narrow configuration may run without consent depending on local law, with cookies disabled, IP addresses anonymised and ecommerce order IDs excluded, among other steps. For Germany it says only server-side tracking is clearly outside the scope of the TDDDG and recommends treating JavaScript tracking as requiring consent.

Google's answer is consent mode. When a visitor refuses analytics storage, Google's help centre says no Analytics cookies are set or read, and in advanced consent mode the tag still sends cookieless pings that Google uses for behavioural and conversion modelling. That keeps the banner in place but, in advanced mode, fills some of the gap with modelled data.

For a store, the trade is plain. Matomo's own steps for a consent-free setup drop order IDs and individual-level analysis, which removes much of what a store wants to know. Our guides to GDPR compliant analytics and consent management go further.

Data retention and sampling

Google Analytics lets you set user and event data retention to 2 or 14 months on a standard property, with longer event data retention only on 360. Google's help centre says the setting affects explorations and funnel reports, not the standard aggregated reports, so year-on-year totals survive while detailed analysis of older data does not.

GA4 can also sample. Google says sampling may occur when a report or exploration needs more events than the property's quota, which is 10 million events for event-level queries on a standard property. The standard daily export to BigQuery is limited to 1 million events.

Matomo Cloud's Business plan lists raw data retention of 24 months and report data kept forever, and lists no data sampling. On-Premise keeps whatever your own database keeps.

Attribution and ecommerce

Google removed the first click, linear, time decay and position-based models from GA4 in November 2023. The current choices are data-driven, paid and organic last click, and Google paid channels last click, with a key event lookback window that defaults to 90 days for most key events.

Matomo's Multi Channel Conversion Attribution offers last interaction, last non-direct interaction, first interaction, linear, position based (40 percent to the first and last, 20 percent shared in between) and time decay, and compares up to three models side by side over 7 to 90 days. It is included in the Cloud Business plan and in the On-Premise Business bundle. Ecommerce tracking is included in every Matomo plan.

With their standard tracking code, both tools record orders from the browser and credit them to the channels in their own data.

What Arktis does for a store

Arktis is our product, so weigh this accordingly. Its tracker captures gclid, gbraid and wbraid from Google, fbclid from Meta, msclkid from Microsoft, ttclid from TikTok and other click identifiers, plus UTM parameters, and holds them against the visitor across sessions, server side. Shopify orders arrive by webhook and are matched to a visit on email where the store has identified the visitor, otherwise on the UTM source of a session from the previous 24 hours, which can be another visitor's session. Unmatched orders are kept, unattributed. An order counts for an ad platform when the visit it was matched to arrived with that platform's click identifier.

From those orders and the conversion events its tracker records, Arktis counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform, next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign once a day. Google, TikTok and other spend is entered by hand per platform and period, which gives a cost per conversion per platform, labelled CAC in the dashboard, and one blended return on ad spend. Its Models view compares five rule-based models per ad platform, and it honours Global Privacy Control by default.

Where Arktis does not fit

Arktis is not a general web analytics replacement for either tool. It cannot be self-hosted, it has no heatmaps or A/B testing, both of which Matomo Cloud Business includes, and it has no free plan, while GA4 and Matomo Community cost nothing. It does not send conversions back to Google Ads the way a linked GA4 property can, and it identifies visitors per browser without joining one person across devices. If you publish content rather than sell products, Matomo or GA4 is the better fit.

Try it next to your current analytics

You can run Arktis alongside Matomo or GA4. To see conversions per UTM campaign and ad platform on your own store, start the 7-day Growth trial, or compare the tiers on the pricing page. For other options, read Google Analytics alternatives and Arktis vs Google Analytics 4.

Sources

Matomo pricing page, Cloud tiers, embedded EUR and USD price data, On-Premise bundles, allowances and FAQ including data location, accessed 16 October 2026 from Sweden, Cloud prices shown in SEK

Matomo FAQ: what is a hit, hit definition and average hits per visit, and Matomo FAQ: pre-ingestion traffic filtering, bot and internal traffic counting towards the hit quota, accessed 16 October 2026

Matomo FAQ: using Matomo without consent, privacy configuration steps and the advice for Germany, accessed 16 October 2026

Matomo: Multi Channel Conversion Attribution, models and comparison window, accessed 16 October 2026

CNIL: use analytics on your websites and applications, conditions for the consent exemption and the reference to Matomo, accessed 16 October 2026

Google Analytics Help: data retention, retention options and their scope, accessed 16 October 2026

Google Analytics Help: about data sampling and BigQuery Export, the 10 million event quota and the 1 million event daily export limit, accessed 16 October 2026

Google Analytics Help: select attribution settings and get started with attribution, available and removed models and lookback windows, accessed 16 October 2026

Google Analytics Help: consent mode, cookieless pings and modelling, and the Google Analytics product page, free of charge, accessed 16 October 2026

EUR-Lex: Case C-703/25 P, Latombe v Commission, the appeal against the General Court judgment of 3 September 2025 on the 10 July 2023 adequacy decision, published 22 December 2025; pending status checked on InfoCuria, accessed 16 October 2026