| Functionality | 3 <p>Vercel's native web analytics offering is very lightweight. It offers only the basics fundamentals of web analytics such as visitor counts, referral tracking and traffic segmentation data. You'll not find anything complex like heatmaps or session replay data here. Additionally, the tool is only usable if you host your site on Vercel.</p> | 4 <p>Google Analytics excels at website visitor tracking but struggles with product analytics. It offers solid traffic analysis and acquisition data but falls short on user behavior insights. Its real power comes from Google Ads integrations and benchmarking functionality.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Given its limited feature set and beautiful design, Vercel Web Analytics is particularly easy to use. It would take an average SMB employee less than 20 minutes to master its use. Our only minor complaint is that unlike other apps, Vercels analytics offering is buried within its developer dashboard as opposed to being a dedicated separate app.</span></p> | 3 <p>GA4 is surprisingly difficult to use despite its popularity. Finding basic metrics often requires hunting through multiple screens. The learning curve is steep, and the recent redesign has only made things worse by disrupting established workflows.</p> |
| Look and feel | 8 <p>Like most of Vercels products, its web analytics suite is superbly designed. It's interfaces are extremely refined and polished and page load times are very snappy (<1s).</p> | 2 <p>GA4's interface is cluttered and confusing. Navigation is a labyrinth of menus and submenus that hide basic information. Reports load quickly but finding the right one is a chore. The design prioritizes Google's needs over users', making common tasks unnecessarily difficult.</p> |
| Customisability | 3 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Beyond custom events, Vercel Web Analytics offers limited scope for customization. We would like to have seen more options to tweak the dashboard itself and change how data is visualized.</span></p> | 6 <p>Google Analytics offers decent customization through custom dimensions and metrics, but implementing these requires technical knowledge. Custom reports are possible but clunky to configure.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Given its integration with Vercel, it's unsurprisingly extremely easy to setup if you're a Vercel user (you can't use it if you're not). We appreciated the self-serve free trial too for free users.</p> | 7 <p>Drop in a tracking code and you're done. Setting up Google Analytics takes minutes, making it very simple to start with like most web analytics products. However, to make full use of the product there is a fair amount of customization that you can action after initial installation.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Vercels developer documentation is well laid out, easy to digest and detailed. It also offers very strong search functionality too. Additionally, it offers reliable help ticket and email support too which takes on average a day to get a response from in our testing.</span></p> | 3 <p>Support is practically non-existent for free users. Google offers documentation but it's often outdated or unclear. Users mostly rely on community forums for help, creating a significant gap compared to privacy-focused alternatives that provide stronger documentation.</p> |
| Integratability | 4 <p>From an analytics perspective, Vercel does offer an API to interact with data programatically. However, given the feature is still nascent, it offers little to nothing in terms of additional integrations.</p> | 8 <p>Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with Google's ecosystem (especially Google Ads) and offers connections to major marketing platforms. Its status as the industry standard means most tools support it, though privacy-focused competitors are quickly catching up.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Vercel offers limited self-serve export functionality directly within its web app, as well as a limited API through which you can interact with data programatically.</p> | 5 <p>Data export options are adequate but outdated. Reports can be exported to spreadsheets or accessed via API, but the process feels clunky compared to modern alternatives.</p> |
