What transfers automatically?

Plausible has a built-in GA4 importer under site settings → Imports & Exports → Google Analytics. It imports daily totals, not individual visits: visitors and pageviews, sources, referrers and UTM campaigns, top pages and landing pages, countries, regions and cities, devices, browsers and operating systems, and goal conversion counts. The import runs from your first GA visitor to the day before your first Plausible visitor. You can stack up to 5 GA properties into one Plausible site, and Plausible adjusts the date ranges so visits are not counted twice. It works on the self-hosted Community Edition too, once you set up a Google OAuth client. What you rebuild: Goals: imported conversion data stays hidden until you recreate each goal under site settings → Goals. GA4 custom events and conversions do not become Plausible goals on their own, and the site needs new plausible() calls or CSS class tags for custom events. Ecommerce revenue cannot be imported. Funnels, revenue goals and custom properties are on the cloud Business plan; funnels and revenue goals are not in the Community Edition. Also set up again: internal-traffic exclusions (Shields → IP Addresses), email or Slack reports, team access, and any Looker Studio report or scheduled job built on GA4 data.

Migration guide · Layer 5

Google Analytics → Plausible

What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.

What it costs, and what it saves

Google describes standard Google Analytics as free ('free of charge' on its Marketing Platform page, read 2026-10-03). Analytics 360 has no public price; Google sends buyers to sales. Plausible Cloud pricing on plausible.io, as listed on 2026-10-03: Starter $9/month (1 site), Growth $14/month (up to 3 sites) and Business $19/month (up to 10 sites), all at the 10k-monthly-pageview tier. Yearly billing gives '2 months free'. The self-hosted Community Edition (AGPLv3) has no licence fee. You pay for a server, and Plausible recommends at least 2 GB of RAM. As an example, DigitalOcean lists a Basic droplet with 2 GiB RAM and 1 vCPU at $12/month, or 4 GiB and 2 vCPU at $24/month (2026-10-03). For most teams on free GA4, this move adds a cost rather than cutting one.

Plausible

AGPL-3.0

Effort: Estimate: 1–2 days of hands-on work for one site (snippet, goals, import, reports), plus a 2–4 week parallel run. Add about half a day on the Community Edition for the server and the Google OAuth client.

Moves cleanly

Plausible has a built-in GA4 importer under site settings → Imports & Exports → Google Analytics. It imports daily totals, not individual visits: visitors and pageviews, sources, referrers and UTM campaigns, top pages and landing pages, countries, regions and cities, devices, browsers and operating systems, and goal conversion counts. The import runs from your first GA visitor to the day before your first Plausible visitor. You can stack up to 5 GA properties into one Plausible site, and Plausible adjusts the date ranges so visits are not counted twice. It works on the self-hosted Community Edition too, once you set up a Google OAuth client.

You rebuild

Goals: imported conversion data stays hidden until you recreate each goal under site settings → Goals. GA4 custom events and conversions do not become Plausible goals on their own, and the site needs new plausible() calls or CSS class tags for custom events. Ecommerce revenue cannot be imported. Funnels, revenue goals and custom properties are on the cloud Business plan; funnels and revenue goals are not in the Community Edition. Also set up again: internal-traffic exclusions (Shields → IP Addresses), email or Slack reports, team access, and any Looker Studio report or scheduled job built on GA4 data.

What Google Analytics costs you today

Free — you pay with your visitors' data and a heavy tracking script

What actually holds you in

Data gravity in Google's ecosystem and a complex, sampling-prone model.

What you are moving to

Plausible is a simple, privacy-friendly analytics tool with a tiny script and no cookies, so you usually skip the consent banner. Self-host the open-source Community Edition or use the hosted plan.

Free self-host (Community Edition); paid cloud

Plausible strengths

Under ~1 KB script, no cookies
GDPR-friendly by design
Clean, focused dashboard

What you give up

Fewer deep-dive reports than GA
Self-host needs a database

The migration, step by step

1Start in GA4 Admin → Data Settings → Data Retention and note how much history you have. Then write down your key GA4 conversion events: Plausible's guide says to list them first because each one has to be recreated as a Plausible goal.
2Create the site in Plausible Cloud, or self-host the Community Edition. To self-host, run git clone -b <release tag from the README> --single-branch https://github.com/plausible/community-edition plausible-ce, set BASE_URL and SECRET_KEY_BASE in .env, then run docker compose up -d. On the Community Edition the importer also needs a Google Cloud OAuth client: enable the Google Analytics Admin and Data APIs, set the redirect to <BASE_URL>/auth/google/callback, and add GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET to .env.
3Add the Plausible snippet inside the <head> of every page, next to the existing GA4 tag, and keep both running for 2–4 weeks as a parallel run. Recreate goals under site settings → Goals, tag custom events with plausible() calls or CSS class names, and block office IPs under Shields → IP Addresses.
4Once Plausible is recording real traffic, run the import: site settings → Imports & Exports → Google Analytics. Sign in with a Google account that can read the property, pick the property, click Continue, then Confirm import. Plausible emails you when the import finishes. Repeat for older GA properties (up to 5 per site).
5Compare the parallel-run weeks side by side and agree with whoever reads the reports which tool's numbers count from now on. Plausible states the two tools calculate metrics differently and will not match exactly, so look for differences you can explain, not identical totals.
6Cutover: remove the GA4 gtag.js or Google Tag Manager tag, update your privacy policy and cookie banner to match the new setup, and move weekly reports and shared dashboards to Plausible. Keep the GA4 property available read-only for as long as anyone still needs its explorations.

The gotcha

Your first Plausible pageview decides where the import stops, not a date you pick. Plausible imports 'from your first Google Analytics visitor until your first Plausible Analytics visitor' and ends the import one day before the first native data point. If someone loaded the snippet on a test page months earlier, the import ends at that test visit and leaves a gap up to your real launch. So create the Plausible site fresh right before the real install, and if a gap shows, delete the import and run it again. The imported numbers have limits too. They are daily totals, so a month's unique visitors are the sum of each day's uniques, which reads higher than GA's own monthly figure. Imported days also have no UTM source dimension, exit pages, scroll depth, hourly graph, browser versions or ecommerce revenue.

When to stay on Google Analytics

Stay on Google Analytics if your work depends on what Plausible's daily-total model does not reproduce: GA4 explorations and user-level paths, audiences shared with Google's ad products, or ecommerce revenue history (which Plausible cannot import). It is also the better choice when a free tool with no server matters more to you than a lighter script and cookieless measurement. Teams on Analytics 360 with contracted SLAs and longer retention gain little from switching mid-contract.

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Figures verified 2026-07-04 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.