Hark vs Google Analytics
Google Analytics answers every question. Hark answers the ones you ask daily.
GA4 is free and can do almost anything, if you learn it and put a consent banner in front of it. Hark is for people who want visitors, sources and pages on one screen, live, without cookies.
| Google Analytics | Hark | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | From $5/mo for 100K pageviews |
| Cookies | Sets first-party cookies (_ga) | None |
| Consent banner in the UK and EU | Needed before it loads | Not needed: nothing is stored on the visitor's device |
| Reports | Dozens of reports, plus Explorations | One page, every report filterable |
| Realtime | Realtime report covering the last 30 minutes | Live world map; each visit appears as it lands |
| Event-level data kept | 2 or 14 months | 1, 2 or 3 years, by plan |
| Recognises visitors across days | Yes | No, by design: ids reset daily |
| Google Ads, audiences and BigQuery export | Yes | No |
| Funnels and journeys | Yes, in Explorations | Not yet |
| Public dashboard | No (Looker Studio can share reports) | Yes, live, plus an embeddable visitor badge |
Google Analytics details checked on 28 September 2026 from GA4 data retention . Prices are monthly, in US dollars. Spot something out of date? Email [email protected] and we'll fix it.
Choose Google Analytics if…
- You run Google Ads and want conversions and audiences fed back into campaigns.
- You need to follow the same visitor across days and weeks: cohorts, retention, multi-day attribution.
- You want raw event exports into BigQuery.
- Budget is zero and you're happy to run a consent banner.
Choose Hark if…
- You'd rather not show a cookie banner just to count visitors.
- You want the numbers on one page, readable in a minute, not a report builder.
- You want to watch a launch or a post take off as it happens.
- You'd like more than 14 months of history.
One thing we won't do
Hark counts visitors with an id that resets every day, so we can't follow anyone from one day to the next. That rules out returning-visitor counts and cohorts. It's also why there's nothing to consent to.
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