Site Kit is Google’s own WordPress plugin, it’s free, and it’s on five million sites. That makes it the most installed analytics plugin in WordPress by some distance, and it deserves to be. It sets up Analytics and Tag Manager without you touching any code, and it puts Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights and AdSense on your dashboard in panels that are, by definition, authoritative. It’s Google reporting on Google.
We make Squizzie, so we have a side. Two things to get out of the way first, because they decide this page for a lot of people.
Site Kit is free and Squizzie isn’t. That’s a real difference and we’re not going to talk around it. If Google’s own numbers are what you need and the budget matters, Site Kit is a good answer and you should use it.
Squizzie doesn’t install Google Analytics. There’s no tracking tag in it. It connects to a GA4 property that already exists and reads it. Site Kit is one of the smoothest ways to create that property in the first place, so these two are far more likely to sit side by side than to replace each other.
What’s left after that is one real difference, and it’s worth understanding before you decide.
The Quick Version
What it is
- Squizzie: A self-hosted WordPress plugin that reads your Google properties and your store database into one report you compose.
- Site Kit: Google’s official plugin, connecting your site to Google’s tools and showing each one’s data on your dashboard.
Price
- Squizzie: Paid. A yearly licence for 2, 5 or 20 sites.
- Site Kit: Free.
Does it track?
- Squizzie: No. It reads a property you already have.
- Site Kit: Yes. It deploys Analytics and Tag Manager for you, which is a large part of why people install it.
Google tools covered
- Squizzie: Analytics 4, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and Business Profile.
- Site Kit: Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, AdSense, Tag Manager, Ads, Sign in with Google and Reader Revenue Manager.
Your store’s data
- Squizzie: Read directly from your WooCommerce order tables. Orders, revenue, average order value, items sold.
- Site Kit: Sales and form completions counted as Analytics events, through its conversion tracking for supported plugins. Not your order table.
Non-Google sources
- Squizzie: Contact form entries from Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, and Contact Form 7 when Flamingo is installed, plus reviews, and customers, loyalty and site search when Tracksies HQ, Perkie or Fetchie is installed.
- Site Kit: Google tools only, though its conversion tracking sends events from supported form and shop plugins into Analytics and reports them back.
How the data is presented
- Squizzie: One report you compose, mixing whichever sources you pick, over the same dates.
- Site Kit: A panel per Google product, plus per-page metrics.
Getting reports out
- Squizzie: PDFs in your own fonts, colours and logo, scheduled email summaries (as many schedules as you like, each with its own recipients and timing), and a Google Sheets export with running log tabs.
- Site Kit: Weekly, monthly or quarterly email reports for people with dashboard access, plus a PDF snapshot you download and send on yourself.
That’s the shape. Now the meaning.
Where Site Kit Does Well
It’s free, from Google, and it’ll stay that way. No licence to renew, no tier to outgrow, no upsell in the sidebar. For a lot of sites that’s the end of the conversation, and fairly so.
Setting up Analytics and Tag Manager without code. This is the job most people install it for and it does it cleanly. If you’ve ever pasted a tag into a theme header and lost it in an update, you already know why this matters.
The numbers are Google’s own. There’s no interpretation layer, no third party’s version of the figures. When you want to know what Search Console says, Site Kit shows you what Search Console says.
Per-page metrics. Look up any page from the dashboard or the admin toolbar and see how it’s doing. That’s a small thing that gets used constantly, and it’s a nice piece of design.
Site Goals. For supported form and shop plugins, Site Kit now counts form completions and sales, and shows form completions as a share of sessions. If you run Contact Form 7, WPForms or Ninja Forms, that’s a free first answer to how your forms are doing.
AdSense and Reader Revenue Manager. If your site earns from Google, Site Kit puts that in the same place as everything else, and Squizzie has nothing in that direction at all. On Google Ads, Site Kit helps you set up the account and conversion tracking but shows no Ads data on its dashboard, while Squizzie reads what you spent into your reports.
Granular permissions. Different people can have access to different Google products through the one plugin, which is useful on a site with a few hands on it.
Where the Approaches Differ
A window onto Google, or Google joined to your shop
This is the whole difference, and once you see it the rest follows.
Site Kit shows you each Google product’s data, well, in its own panel. Even its form and sales counts come through Analytics: they’re what the tag saw, reported back. Your order table, your reviews and your customers aren’t in it, because they aren’t Google products.
Squizzie reads those same Google properties into the same list as your WooCommerce order tables, your contact form entries and your reviews, and lets you build one report across them.
So the questions split:
- How many people found us through search last month? Site Kit. Free, official, done.
- How are my contact forms doing against my traffic? Site Kit answers part of this now: its Site Goals show form completions as a share of sessions for Contact Form 7, WPForms, Ninja Forms and a few others, as Analytics counted them. It doesn’t cover Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms, and it counts what the tag saw rather than the entries in your database. Squizzie counts the entries themselves.
- What did we actually make, and where did those buyers come from? That needs the orders table and the traffic data together.
Neither tool is failing at the other’s job. They’re built for different questions.
Google’s record of your shop, or your shop’s own record
Worth saying clearly, because it catches people out.
Squizzie’s revenue comes from queries against your WooCommerce order tables, which hold every order that took money. Its revenue figure is the order total, tax and shipping included, across your paid order statuses. Any shop figure in Site Kit is whatever Analytics’ tag recorded.
Those two numbers won’t match, and neither is lying. They’re counting different things in different places, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re looking at.
Reports that leave the dashboard
Site Kit’s reports reach further than the dashboard now: email reports go to anyone with dashboard access, and you can download a PDF snapshot for someone who can’t log in. What it doesn’t do is send on a schedule to someone outside WordPress, or carry your own fonts and colours.
Squizzie is built around the report going somewhere else. Branded PDFs in your own fonts, colours and logo, scheduled sends where each recipient gets their own copy, and a Sheets export that writes running log tabs so trend data builds over time. That’s for the stock figures somebody needs to plan next month’s order, the quarterly numbers the accountant asks for, and the traffic and conversion view for whoever’s buying the ads.
And "somebody" is often you, wearing three hats. Plenty of shops are the accountant and the product dev and the marketer in the same chair. It’s still three different questions, and you still can’t make good decisions without the data in front of you. The difference is the report turns up in your inbox instead of you remembering to go and look.
One place on a Friday, or a tab for every tool
Site Kit is itself a consolidation play, and a good one. Its whole pitch is that Google’s tools stop being a separate login each and become one dashboard. Credit where it’s due.
The difference is the size of the circle. Site Kit consolidates Google. Squizzie consolidates your business.
Your week doesn’t happen only in Google. It happens in your orders, your contact form entries, your reviews, the loyalty points going out, and what people typed into your search box and didn’t find. Those sit in as many different screens as you have plugins, and checking every one of them is a job nobody actually does on a Friday afternoon.
Squizzie reads from up to twenty sources of its own, depending on what’s installed, and adds site search, support and loyalty when Fetchie, Helpie or Perkie is installed. Woo orders, products and customers when WooCommerce is running. Reviews from WooCommerce, or from Trustie when it’s installed. Contact forms, profit, customer lifetime value (with Tracksies HQ), returns, and the Google properties.
So: wanna look at your biz for the week in one place at Friday coffee? You got it.
That’s the whole point of it. Site Kit will tell you what Google knows, accurately and for free, and you’ll still have to go somewhere else for everything Google doesn’t. One report instead of that walk is the difference between meaning to look and looking.
The one figure behind that question
How are my contact forms doing against traffic is a tile in Squizzie called Form Conversion Rate: form entries over Analytics sessions, as a percentage.
It’s one of two tiles whose source is derived, built from two places rather than one. That’s the difference between a dashboard putting things side by side and a report dividing one by the other.
It won’t offer itself in the report editor until both halves are there. Without a form plugin and Analytics, it’s greyed out and says "Needs a form plugin and Google Analytics connected".
Sentences, not only charts
Squizzie writes up to fourteen cross-data insights automatically, each appearing when its sources are connected, in plain language rather than leaving them as charts to interpret. They appear on the dashboard and in the PDFs, including the PDF a scheduled email can carry.
Whether that helps depends on you. If you read dashboards fluently, a sentence is slower than a chart. If you’ve opened an analytics dashboard, looked at it a while, and closed it without deciding anything, that’s the gap it’s built for.
Business Profile, and what each one covers
The Google tool lists aren’t the same in either direction.
Site Kit covers AdSense, Tag Manager, Google Ads, Sign in with Google and Reader Revenue Manager. Squizzie covers none of those as connections, though it does read Google Ads spend through Analytics. If any of them matter to you, that’s a clear answer.
Squizzie covers Google Business Profile, which Site Kit doesn’t. If your local listing, its reviews and its ratings are part of how customers find you, that sits in Squizzie’s reports next to everything else.
A performance report that tells you what’s yours to fix
Both tools surface PageSpeed Insights. Squizzie adds a layer on top: it splits your score into what you can fix, what needs a developer, and what isn’t your fault at all, attributing third-party load to forty-seven named services.
That’s narrow, and nobody buys an analytics tool for it. But "why is my site slow and which part of it is even mine" is a question site owners ask constantly and rarely get a straight answer to.
Where your data lives
No SaaS holds your data. Every report lives in your own WordPress database, so you keep it, export it and never lose access to it, and nothing goes to an AI service. When a job needs outside help, Squizzie sends only what that job needs: QuickChart gets a chart’s labels and numbers to draw it in a PDF, and sends back the picture. Your Google figures come from your own Google account, and the Sheets export writes to your own Google account.
If you use an AI assistant. If you don’t, skip this one.
Nothing in this section changes what Squizzie does for you. If AI in your business tools isn’t something you want, skip to the next bit and you lose nothing at all.
There’s no AI service behind Squizzie. The abilities below answer only an assistant someone has connected to the site, fetching Google figures from Google when asked. No assistant can see your numbers unless you’ve deliberately connected one to your own site. It’s a door in your own house, and it stays shut until you open it.
For anyone who does want it: Squizzie registers its reports as WordPress abilities, so an assistant working on your site can ask your store and Google data a question and get the real numbers back, instead of guessing from a screenshot you pasted in. It’s read-only, so nothing can be changed through it, and it’s limited to people who can already view your reports.
Those queries can take a comparison period, so an assistant can ask how this month went against last month, or against the same month last year. Where the metrics query can’t produce a comparison, it says so rather than returning a zero.
Where the metrics query can’t get a figure, it returns none rather than a zero, and says why. Ad spend is the clearest case: where Analytics holds no ad cost, whether no account is linked or nothing was spent, you get no figure, not a confident zero.
Site Kit doesn’t expose anything comparable today, which is a little surprising given who makes it. Nothing structural is stopping it.
Two limits. It needs a version of WordPress carrying the Abilities API, so an older site won’t see it. And it isn’t a chatbot: Squizzie isn’t answering your questions, it’s making its numbers available to something that does.
When Site Kit Is Your Answer
You need Google Analytics on your site. Squizzie has no tracking code. Site Kit will set it up for free in a few clicks, and you’ll want that done whichever tool you end up reporting with.
Google’s data is the data you need. If the questions you ask are about search, traffic and page speed, Site Kit answers them officially and at no cost. Adding a paid tool on top of that would be spending money for nothing.
Your forms are covered by Site Goals. If you run Contact Form 7, WPForms or Ninja Forms and a completion rate from Analytics is enough, Site Kit gives you that for free.
Budget is the constraint. Free matters. If it’s a choice between Site Kit and nothing, install Site Kit today.
You use AdSense or Tag Manager. Those are Site Kit’s and we have no answer to them. Google Ads is a partial exception: Site Kit sets it up, we read the spend.
You want fewer moving parts. One official plugin from Google, covering the Google side, is a clean setup and there’s real value in that.
Who Should Choose What
Site Kit is likely the better fit if you:
- Need Analytics or Tag Manager deployed on your site, which Squizzie doesn’t do.
- Only need Google’s own data, presented officially.
- Want it free, with nothing to renew.
- Earn through AdSense.
- Want per-page metrics from the Site Kit dashboard or the admin toolbar.
Squizzie is likely the better fit if you:
- Need Google data and your store data in the same report, over the same dates.
- Want store numbers counted from your order tables rather than from tracking.
- Run Gravity Forms or Fluent Forms, or want form entries counted from your own database.
- Need reports shaped to send onward: stock planning, the quarterly figures, where the ad budget goes. Whether that’s three people or you three times.
- Would rather read what the numbers mean than work it out from the chart.
- Want the whole week in one place rather than a tab per tool.
- Want Google Business Profile in the mix.
- Already run other Tracksies plugins and want reviews, loyalty and support feeding the same reports.
Running Both
This is the likely answer for most WooCommerce shops, and it isn’t a diplomatic dodge.
Site Kit deploys Analytics, keeps the tag healthy, and gives you Google’s own panels for free. Squizzie reads that same property back out and sits it beside your orders, forms and reviews in a report you can send to someone.
One creates and shows the Google data. The other joins it to your business. Nothing in either stops the other working, and there’s no reason to remove a free official plugin to add a paid one.
If you’re already running Site Kit and it answers everything you ask, that’s a good place to be. The question isn’t whether to switch. It’s whether you’ve ever needed a number that sat half in Google and half in your own database.
Go Have a Look
Squizzie: see it at tracksies.com and in the docs at docs.tracksies.com. Self-hosted, your reports live in your own database, and for its Analytics figures it needs a GA4 property already running.
Site Kit by Google: free, official, five million installs, and the simplest way to get Google’s tools onto a WordPress site.
