Google Analytics can do a lot. But with all that power comes complexity: a maze of reports, explorations, funnels and segments. Throw in a consent banner and a heavy script download for every visitor, and it becomes a lot of machinery for a simple question.
You want to know which pages people read last week. In GA4 that's a report if you're lucky and an exploration if you're not, and the number at the end often arrives with a small icon beside it warning you that it's an estimate.
Most websites and businesses just want to know how many people visited, where from, and what they did, without routing their visitors through an ad company to find out. That's what Cabin is for.
Some people suggest that Google Analytics is illegal in Europe. It's not. But legal consent is the part that you need to be careful about.
GA4 sets cookies by default, and a cookie that recognises a returning visitor needs permission in the EU and the UK. So every person who declines your banner, dismisses it or simply ignores it is a person your analytics can't count. Google's answer is Consent Mode: a signal wired through every tag, telling Google what each visitor agreed to, with the gap filled in by modelled data. A statistical guess, rather than a count.
of data missing on sites with no consent banner
of data missing on sites with one
Those are an agency's numbers, not Cabin's: 60 comparisons of GA4 against systems of record across 33 accounts. The banner roughly doubles what goes missing.
Cabin sets no cookies, builds no fingerprint and creates no identifier of any kind, so there's nothing to ask permission for. No banner, no Consent Mode, no modelled gap. Everyone gets counted, whatever they click. There's a longer version of that argument in the banner you don't need.
Ad blockers take the other bite, and they block Cabin too. Block lists draw a hard line on anything that resembles tracking, and everyone has the right to block whatever requests they like, so that's fair enough. On paid plans you can serve Cabin from your own domain with a single CNAME record, which puts those visits back in your numbers without changing anything for the visitor.
Missing-data figures: Orbit Media Studios, 60 GA4 comparisons across 33 accounts. A US study of 563 people also found 61% believe closing a banner rejects cookies, which on many sites it doesn't.
Cabin's gzipped script is 1.2 KB, and gzipped is the number that matters: those are the bytes that actually travel down the wire for every visitor. Google Tag Manager piles on another 30 to 50 KB before a single tag fires. Cabin's script is cached for 30 days, too. gtag.js, for 15 minutes.
of visitor data every year
Cabin's average yearly script requests compared with Google's gtag.js saves around 35 terabytes of extra data pushed to people's devices every year. And that's before the page even runs: a lighter script also means faster loads and less mobile data for every single visitor.
HD feature films, streamed on Netflix
of driving avoided, nearly twice around the planet (≈13.5 tonnes CO₂e)
Script sizes measured gzipped on 16 August 2026: Cabin 1,212 bytes, gtag.js 148,838. Google's moves about (it was 86 KB a month earlier), so check it yourself with curl -s -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" <url> | wc -c. Carbon estimated with The Green Web Foundation's CO2.js (Sustainable Web Design model); driving equivalent uses UK 2024 emission factors.
No cookies, no fingerprint, no identifier of any kind. Nothing to ask permission for under GDPR, ePrivacy or PECR, so there's no banner to show.
Sets cookies by default, so EU and UK visitors have to be asked. GA4 itself is legal in Europe. Getting consent right, and keeping it right, is the work.
One line of HTML, live in about 30 seconds. Everything that matters sits on one screen you don't need training to read.
Set up a property, a data stream, then filters and events. Google runs courses on it, which tells you most of what you need to know.
Every visit counted, whatever anyone clicked, with no sampling and no modelling. Ad blockers still stop the script, so paid plans let you serve it from your own domain.
Loses the visitors who decline or dismiss the banner, and the ones running an ad blocker. Consent Mode fills part of that back in with modelled estimates.
Estimates the CO₂ of every page you measure, and runs on renewable energy, so the analytics itself adds very little.
No carbon reporting, and the heavier script adds a little to every page load.
An MCP server on every plan, including Free. Point Claude or ChatGPT at your dashboard and ask it questions, or let it add a domain for you.
Data and Admin APIs exist, but no native agent support. You build, authorise and host that integration yourself.
Free for 10 sites and 10,000 pageviews a month. Plus is $14 a month for a million pageviews and unlimited sites.
Free at almost any scale, which is the point worth thinking about: it's a free product from the world's largest advertising company.
Cabin counts visitors using the browser's own cache rather than a cookie, so nothing is stored on anyone's device and no identifier exists to consent to. Your numbers stop depending on who clicked Accept.
How Cabin counts without cookiesCabin speaks MCP out of the box, so the agent you already build with can pull a report or add a domain mid-conversation. No API to wire up, no glue code to host, and it's on the free plan too.
See MCP accessSmall enough that it won't show up in your performance budget or your Largest Contentful Paint, and light enough that measuring your carbon footprint doesn't noticeably add to it.
Check your site's carbonThe honest way to decide is not to decide yet. Leave GA4 where it is, add Cabin's line of HTML beside it, and give the two of them a fortnight. The numbers won't match. Most of the difference is the visitors Google Analytics never saw.