Google Analytics vs Sentry
Pricing
Google Analytics: Free
Sentry: Free tier, Team from $26/mo
Description
Google Analytics: Google's free web and app analytics for traffic sources, user journeys and conversions, linked to Google Ads and Search Console
Sentry: Error tracking that shows you exactly what broke, for which user, and how to reproduce it
Pros
- Free of charge, with one property able to cover both your website and your app
- Integrates with Google Ads and Google Search Console
- Machine-learning features estimate which customers are likely to take an action next
- Full stack traces with user context: you see exactly what happened
- Supports every major language and framework
- Free tier covers 5,000 errors/month, which is plenty to start
Cons
- Ties data to cookies and user identifiers, unlike cookie-free tools such as Plausible and Fathom
- The free version keeps user-level and event-level data for explorations for 14 months at most
- Longer retention (26 to 50 months) needs Analytics 360, the paid enterprise version
- Can be noisy: without tuning alert thresholds, you get bombarded
- Pricing gets complex and expensive once you need performance monitoring
- Initial setup and filtering takes time to get right
Details
Google Analytics is Google’s own analytics service for websites and apps. You add a tag to your site or app and get reports on where visitors come from, what they do and which of them convert. It costs nothing.
It suits founders who run Google Ads or want the most detail without paying. The reports cover cross-platform journeys, attribution across channels and machine-learning forecasts.
Two limits are worth knowing. Data in explorations and funnel reports is kept for 2 or 14 months on the free version (standard reports are not affected), and the data is linked to cookies and identifiers. If you would rather not use cookies at all, look at Plausible or Fathom.
Sentry catches errors in production before your users email you about them. When something breaks, you get a stack trace, the user’s browser/device info, the exact request that triggered it, and breadcrumbs showing what happened before the error. It is the difference between “something is broken” and “this specific API call fails for Firefox users on line 47.”
The free tier covers 5,000 errors per month. For a solo founder, that is more than enough unless something is seriously wrong. The main annoyance is noise: out of the box, Sentry will alert you about every third-party script error and browser extension conflict. Spend 30 minutes configuring filters when you set it up, and it becomes invaluable.
Google Analytics verified
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