The Ecomm Analyst

GA4 is free, which is most of the reason it is everywhere. The standard version costs nothing, and the enterprise tier, Analytics 360, starts around $50,000 a year on a contract you negotiate through Google or a reseller. For a Shopify store doing one to twenty million a year, 360 is never the real question. The free version is. And the free version is a capable, general-purpose web analytics tool that was never built to answer the questions a store operator actually asks.

I have written before about why GA4 is fine and still not the answer for most operators. This is the practical follow-up. If you want the questions GA4 sidesteps actually answered, here is where I would look.

The problem is not that GA4 is broken. It is that GA4 reports on sessions and events on your site, while you need to know which ad drove which order, what a customer is worth over a year, and whether your blended return on ad spend went up or down this week. GA4 attribution gets thinner every time Apple or a browser tightens tracking, and the ecommerce reporting needs constant babysitting to stay honest against Shopify’s own numbers. Most operators end up exporting GA4 into a spreadsheet and rebuilding the views they wanted in the first place. The tools below skip that step.

ThoughtMetric

ThoughtMetric is the one I reach for most, so take the bias as given. I have a commercial relationship with them. It is an attribution and analytics platform built for ecommerce rather than retrofitted for it. Pricing starts at $99 a month for 50,000 pageviews and scales on pageviews from there, with every feature included on every tier, which is rare in this category. It gives you server-side tracking that survives ad blockers and iOS, multi-touch attribution with five models you can switch between, and post-purchase how-did-you-hear-about-us surveys that let you check the algorithmic attribution against what customers actually say. For a store that mainly wants to know which channels and creatives drive revenue without a five-figure contract, it is the cleanest place to start.

Triple Whale

Triple Whale is the name you will hear most in DTC Slack channels. It is an all-in-one dashboard with a first-party pixel, multi-touch attribution, creative analytics, and an AI assistant called Moby that answers plain-language questions about your data. There is a free tier, and paid plans start around $179 a month on annual billing before moving to GMV-based pricing above $5 million in revenue. The tradeoff is breadth. You are buying a wide platform, and smaller stores often pay for surface area they never touch. If you have someone who will live in the dashboard every day, the daily-decision cadence is where it earns its cost.

Polar Analytics

Polar Analytics sits closer to the data-platform end of the range. Every plan ships a dedicated Snowflake database underneath, so you can build custom metrics and query raw data instead of being boxed into prebuilt reports. Pricing runs on monthly tracked orders and starts in the mid hundreds a month, climbing into four figures as GMV grows. Reach for it if your team has some data appetite and wants to own the warehouse layer without hiring an engineer to stand it up. If all you want is a dashboard, it is more tool than you need.

Northbeam

Northbeam is for the heavier spenders. It pairs multi-touch attribution with media mix modeling and deterministic view-through tracking, and it is aimed squarely at brands putting real money into ads. The Starter plan runs around $1,000 to $1,500 a month and is built for stores spending at least $250,000 a month across channels, with custom pricing above that. The models need a few weeks to calibrate and reward a media buyer who is actively using them. Spend under six figures a month on ads and you are paying for rigor you cannot yet use. Spend well past it and the attribution is among the most trusted in the category.

Peel Insights

Peel Insights comes at the problem from the retention side instead of the acquisition side. Where the others fixate on which ad earned the click, Peel goes deep on cohorts, lifetime value, repeat purchase rate, and subscription behavior. Pricing starts around $199 a month and climbs through tiers into the high hundreds, with the top tier quote-based. It fits brands where the real question is not which ad but how to get more of your best customers to come back, which is most subscription and replenishment businesses.

Picking between these

• If you want ecommerce attribution without an enterprise contract, start with ThoughtMetric.
• If you want a broad daily dashboard with an AI layer and someone to run it, Triple Whale.
• If you want to own your data warehouse and build your own metrics, Polar Analytics.
• If you are spending six figures a month on ads and need attribution plus media mix modeling, Northbeam.
• If your growth lives in retention and subscriptions rather than acquisition, Peel Insights.

None of these is a GA4 replacement in the literal sense, and you should not treat them like one. Keep GA4 running. It is free and it is a fine backstop for site behavior and Google Ads. What these tools replace is the spreadsheet you built to answer the questions GA4 left open. Pick the one whose core question matches yours, run it next to Shopify’s own numbers for a month, and trust the one that stays closest to your actual deposits.