Peeko vs Google Analytics 4 on cost, cookies and data

You are weighing a move off GA4. This post lays out what each tool costs, what each keeps, and what only GA4 can do. Every claim about GA4 links to Google's own documentation, and prices and limits carry the month we read them. Everything about Peeko comes from what Peeko does, not from a test we ran against GA4. We did not run both tools on one site, so this post makes no claim about which one counts a given visit higher.

What each one costs, as of October 2026

GA4 costs nothing to use. Google's Analytics page says the product gives you its tools "free of charge" to understand the customer journey. There is also a paid tier, Google Analytics 360, which Google describes as "the premium, enterprise version" with higher limits and more advanced features. That help page lists no price. It points you to an account representative or a Google Analytics partner, so we cannot give you a number for 360.

Peeko is one plan on a slider. It runs from 100,000 to 10,000,000 events a month and from 9 to 199 dollars monthly, as of October 2026. Yearly billing is two months free. Every feature is on every size, with unlimited sites and unlimited team seats. The pricing page lists the 100,000 event size at 9 dollars a month.

The trial is fourteen days with no card. It starts when you create your account and covers one site.

An event in Peeko is a page view, an outbound click or a custom event, counted over the UTC calendar month. AI crawler hits are never billed, and nothing stops recording when you pass your limit. Check what each tool calls an event before you compare totals across the two.

So the price question is simple. GA4 is 0 dollars. Peeko is at least 9 dollars a month after a fourteen day trial. What you get for that difference is the rest of this post.

What each one keeps, and for how long

Peeko keeps page views, events and crawler hits for three years by default. A site owner can set that window anywhere from 30 days to ten years.

GA4 has two retention settings that matter, and they are easy to misread. For event data on a standard property, Google's data retention page lets you choose 2 months or 14 months. The setting "only affects explorations and funnel reports", not the standard aggregated reports. Age, gender and interest data always get the two month period, whatever you choose. The longer options of 26, 38 and 50 months are marked "360 only".

Source: Google, Data retention - Analytics Help, Oct 10, 2026. Retrieved Oct 10, 2026.

Read that carefully before you decide what you will lose. Your standard reports in GA4 are not cut off at 14 months. What expires is the event level detail behind explorations and funnels. If you build funnels on old data, 14 months is the ceiling on a free property.

The other way to keep raw data is an export. Google's limits table shows a standard property's daily BigQuery export at 1 million events, with streaming export unlimited, and 360 at billions of events a day. If your site records more than 1 million events a day, the daily export will not hold all of it.

Cookies and what counts as a visitor

GA4's tag sets two first-party cookies. Google's cookie reference lists _ga, used to distinguish users, and _ga_<container-id>, used to persist session state. Both default to an expiration of 2 years, and the page notes that browsers can enforce shorter lifespans.

Peeko sets no cookie. A visitor is the first part of a one way keyed hash of their address and browser string, and the address itself is never written to a database or a log. The hash behind the People number mixes in the date and is re-salted every day, so nobody can be followed from one day to the next.

Peeko does keep a second hash, without the date. It tells a returning visitor from a new one, and it strings a person's page views into a journey. It is also the identity behind goals, funnels and revenue. That is a real trade: Peeko can follow a person across days for those features, and it does so without a cookie or a stored IP address. If you need no cross-day identity at all, say so before you pick any tool, because Peeko does hold this one.

Where Google Analytics 4 is the better choice

Be honest with yourself about these. For each, GA4 either does it or Peeko is not described here as doing it.

• You run Google Ads. Google's page lists Google Ads among its integrations, with links across its advertising and publisher tools. We do not describe an ads integration for Peeko in this post, so if bidding or audiences depend on that link, stay.
• You want predictive insights. Google's page says GA4 can "anticipate future customer actions with Google's machine learning". Peeko's feature list here has nothing like it.
• You measure an app as well as a site. Google describes measurement across websites and apps, with cross-platform attribution. Peeko is described here as a script tag for pages.
• You need a free warehouse feed. A standard property exports to BigQuery, at up to 1 million events a day in the daily export and unlimited in streaming, per the limits table. If your analysts live in SQL, that matters more than any dashboard.
• You are an enterprise. GA4's paid tier raises limits and retention up to 50 months. Peeko's top size is 10,000,000 events a month.
• You cannot spend 9 dollars a month. A free tool is free. If a site earns nothing and you check it twice a year, GA4 costs less.

There is also a limit that favors neither tool but affects the move: web streams on GA4 have, per Google's collection limits, no limit on the number of distinctly named events. A migration will not run into a naming cap on the Google side.

Where Peeko fits better

Peeko fits a site owner, often working with a coding agent, who wants answers instead of a reporting tool to learn.

AI crawlers. Crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a tag that runs in the page, which is what gtag.js is, never sees them. Peeko tracks them on a separate server side path. The @usepeeko/bot-track middleware is ESM only, needs Node 20 or newer, has zero runtime dependencies and weighs under 3 KB gzipped.

npm install @usepeeko/bot-track

Peeko matches the user agent against a curated list of 55 agents from 21 companies. It files every recognized hit under AI answers, Search indexing, AI training or Other AI bots. No address and no visitor hash exist on that path, and the raw user agent is kept up to 512 characters so old hits can be reclassified as the list grows. For what this looks like on a real site, read what happened to crawler traffic before and after llms.txt and the first 30 days of AI crawlers on a new site.

AI assistant referrals. Visits that arrive from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini are counted from ordinary page views by their referrer, with no middleware. The method is in how to count visits from AI assistants by referrer. To carry such a visit through to a signup without a cookie, see following an AI referral to signup without cookies.

Goals that look backward. A goal in Peeko is a definition, not a counter. A goal written today counts over months before it was written, and a site can hold twenty of them. Five kinds of click need no code: outbound, phone, email, whatsapp and form. A funnel holds two to five steps, follows a person rather than a visit, and a site can hold ten.

Revenue without a stored key. Revenue arrives through a one line window.peeko.revenue call or a verified Stripe webhook, and the two totals are never added together. Peeko never holds a Stripe API key. The only credential it stores is the webhook signing secret, which proves an event came from your account and does nothing else.

Agents and the command line. Peeko hosts an MCP server at usepeeko.com/api/mcp. It is read only except for one tool that creates a site, and a bearer API key scopes it to the sites of your teams. The command line needs no install:

npx @usepeeko/cli

It speaks the same endpoint an agent does, so a command and a tool call return the same numbers.

Search data in the same place. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools connect read only with encrypted tokens, and their rows are kept for sixteen months. Google publishes search data about three days late and revises its three most recent days. Bing's query rows are weekly buckets dated to a Friday, so a Bing position is derived and can be null.

How to move without losing your footing

1. Keep GA4 running while you add Peeko. One script tag with a site key is all it needs.
2. Set your retention in GA4 to 14 months if it is on 2, so the explorations and funnels you rely on keep their detail while you decide.
3. If you want raw history, turn on the BigQuery export while you still have the property.
4. Write your goals in Peeko on day one. They will count backward over the data Peeko already holds.
5. Compare after a full month, and compare totals knowing that each tool defines its counts differently.
6. Remove the GA4 tag when your answers no longer depend on it.

If you decide GA4's ad link or its predictive features are what you use, stay. If you open GA4 mostly to ask how many people came, where from, and whether the AI crawlers found you, a tool with one tag and no cookie answers that with less to maintain.