MonsterInsights is one of the biggest analytics plugins in WordPress, and calls itself the most popular Google Analytics plugin for it. Two million active installs on WordPress.org, 4.5 stars from over three thousand ratings, and their own site puts the professional count above three million. It earned that. Setting up Google Analytics 4 properly is fiddly, and MonsterInsights turns it into a few clicks with no code and nothing to break when you switch themes.
We make Squizzie, so we have a side. But before anything else, here’s the thing that decides this page for most people:
Squizzie doesn’t install Google Analytics. There’s no tracking tag anywhere in it. It connects to a GA4 property you already have and reads it. So something else has to put GA4 on your site first, and MonsterInsights is one of the best things going for that job.
That makes these two far more likely to sit side by side than to replace each other. If you’re picking one to start with and you haven’t got GA4 running yet, start with MonsterInsights or Site Kit. Come back to this page when the data’s flowing.
For everyone who already has GA4 working, there’s a real difference worth understanding, and it isn’t about features.
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.
- MonsterInsights: The plugin that installs Google Analytics on your site and brings GA4’s reports into your dashboard.
Does it track?
- Squizzie: No. It reads a GA4 property you already have.
- MonsterInsights: Yes, and it’s the reason most people install it.
Where your store numbers come from
- Squizzie: Direct queries against your WooCommerce order tables.
- MonsterInsights: GA4’s eCommerce tracking, so whatever the script recorded.
Google sources
- Squizzie: Analytics 4, Search Console, Business Profile and PageSpeed, in one list alongside your store data.
- MonsterInsights: Analytics 4 and Search Console reports, plus its own Site Speed report.
Reports
- Squizzie: You compose one, choosing sources and metrics, or start from one of five templates, and it can mix Google and store data in the same report.
- MonsterInsights: Sixteen well-made fixed reports, each answering its own question.
Beyond the numbers
- Squizzie: Nothing. It reports.
- MonsterInsights: UserFeedback on Elite. Heatmaps, NPS and on-site surveys, so you get the why and not only the what.
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 Google Sheets export with running log tabs.
- MonsterInsights: PDF export and email summaries, from the Plus tier up.
Where your data lives
- Squizzie: Your WordPress database, on your own hosting.
- MonsterInsights: Your site, plus your Google Analytics property.
Pricing model
- Squizzie: A yearly licence for 2, 5 or 20 sites.
- MonsterInsights: Tiered annual, by site count, with WooCommerce and the eCommerce report on the Pro tier. Their figures below are in US dollars.
That’s the shape. Now the meaning.
Where MonsterInsights Does Well
Installing GA4 without touching code. This is the hard, boring, valuable thing, and MonsterInsights is the best-known answer to it. Two million sites didn’t land there by accident.
Sixteen reports that each know their job. Audience, Publishers, Content, eCommerce, Forms, Search Console, Landing Pages, Source and Medium, Campaigns, Technology, Coupons, Cart Abandonment, Funnels and more. They’re built, they’re tested, and you don’t have to design them. If a fixed report already asks your question, that beats building one.
A Forms report. On Pro, it sets form completions beside sessions, with a conversion rate for each form, across WPForms, Gravity Forms, Formidable, Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, Elementor and Divi forms.
It answers "why", and we can’t. UserFeedback on the Elite tier brings heatmaps, NPS and on-site surveys. Knowing a page converts at two percent is a number. Knowing people leave because the shipping cost surprised them is a reason. Squizzie has nothing in that direction at any price.
Campaign and attribution depth. UTM tracking surfaced properly, source and medium broken out, and reports built around those questions. Their PPC addon adds conversion tracking for seven ad networks, including Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat. If you want your campaigns reporting correctly inside the networks you buy from, that’s their ground.
An AI chat on every plan. You can ask your analytics questions inside the plugin.
Built for people who run lots of sites. Five-site licences, multisite support, client licence management and advanced access control on the higher tiers. If you look after client sites, that’s a real fit.
A team behind it. Big company, priority support, a 14-day money-back guarantee, and frequent releases.
Where the Approaches Differ
Google’s record of your shop, or your shop’s own record
This is the one that matters, and neither answer is wrong.
MonsterInsights’ eCommerce Report is built on GA4’s enhanced eCommerce tracking. It’s what the tracking script recorded.
Squizzie’s order numbers are database queries straight against your WooCommerce order tables. Orders, revenue, average order value, items sold, shipping. Its revenue figure is the order total, tax and shipping included, across your paid order statuses.
Those two numbers won’t match, and neither one is lying. Your order table holds every order that took money. GA4 holds what its tag recorded.
So the question decides the tool:
- Which campaign drove those sales? You need GA4’s attribution. That’s MonsterInsights.
- What came through the shop last quarter? You need the orders table. That’s Squizzie.
If you’ve ever put GA4’s revenue figure next to your Woo reports and wondered which one to believe, the answer is both, for different jobs.
Sixteen good reports, or one you build
MonsterInsights gives you a set of reports somebody else designed well. Squizzie gives you a report editor, a list of sources, and five templates to start from.
Which is better depends entirely on whether a fixed report already answers your question. When it does, fixed wins every time. When it doesn’t, you’re back to exporting and pasting into a spreadsheet.
The Squizzie version lets you put things side by side that no fixed report pairs up, because the Google sources and the store sources sit in the same list. Take how are my contact forms doing against traffic. MonsterInsights answers a version of this too: its Forms report on Pro sets form completions beside sessions, from what Analytics tracked. Squizzie’s version counts the entries in your form plugin’s own tables, and sits them in the same report as your orders.
Reports that go to someone else
MonsterInsights does email summaries and PDF export from Plus up, so that isn’t a gap.
The finer difference is who they’re shaped for. Squizzie’s PDFs carry your own fonts, colours and logo from the Designer, scheduled sends give each recipient their own copy, and the Sheets export writes running log tabs that build trend data over time. That’s built around the report leaving the building: the stock figures for whoever plans next month’s order, the quarterly numbers for the accountant, the traffic and conversion view for whoever’s buying the ads.
And "whoever" 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 lands in your own inbox on Monday instead of you remembering to go looking.
One place on a Friday, or a tab for every tool
MonsterInsights consolidates too, and it’s worth being precise about what. It brings Google Analytics into WordPress so you stop logging into GA4, and turns it into readable reports. That’s real, and it’s a good part of why two million people installed it.
The difference is the size of the circle. MonsterInsights consolidates Google Analytics. 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. Good reports about your traffic still leave you opening WooCommerce to find out whether any of it sold anything. One report instead of two tabs is the difference between meaning to look and looking.
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 again without deciding anything, that’s the gap it’s built for.
What it costs to keep
MonsterInsights lists Plus at USD$99.50 for the first year, Pro at USD$199.50 and Elite at USD$299.50. Their own footnote is worth reading: "Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price." Full price is USD$199, USD$399 and USD$599 a year.
Two things follow for a WooCommerce shop. The WooCommerce integration and the eCommerce report are on Pro, not Plus. And the number to budget for is the renewal, not the first year.
Squizzie is a yearly licence for 2, 5 or 20 sites. The figures above are US dollars and Tracksies prices in Australian dollars, so convert before you compare, because an unconverted side-by-side flatters whichever one is quoted in USD.
A performance report that tells you what’s yours to fix
Squizzie’s PageSpeed advisory 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. It’s a narrow thing and nobody buys an analytics tool for it, but it answers a question site owners ask constantly and rarely get a straight answer to.
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".
Where your data lives
No SaaS holds your Squizzie 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.
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.
MonsterInsights has gone a different way: its own AI chat, on every plan, answers questions about your analytics inside the plugin. We found nothing registered for an outside assistant through WordPress’s Abilities API (we checked the free version’s code).
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 MonsterInsights Is Your Answer
You haven’t got GA4 on the site yet. This is the big one and it isn’t close. Squizzie has no tracking code. Install MonsterInsights, get GA4 running properly, and you’ll have data worth reading either way.
You want to know why, not only what. Heatmaps, surveys and NPS on the Elite tier tell you things no amount of store data will.
Your forms are the question, and Analytics’ count is enough. The Forms report on Pro covers the common form plugins.
Paid attribution is the job. Squizzie isn’t empty here: it reads source and medium from your GA4 property, and it attributes orders, revenue and discount to specific coupon codes, straight from the order table rather than from a tracking script. But attributing sales to ads inside the networks is MonsterInsights’ ground.
This is the one place the comparison runs our way, and it’s worth being precise rather than triumphant.
Squizzie reads ad spend, clicks, impressions and cost per click from the same GA4 property it already reads, so it can tell you a campaign cost six hundred dollars for nine hundred clicks and twelve conversions, and put that beside the three thousand your shop took that month.
MonsterInsights can now launch a Google Ads campaign from inside WordPress, and its results show up in the Campaigns report through UTM tags. We found nothing in their documentation that brings the spend back in. Their eCommerce report covers conversion rate, transactions, revenue, average order value, top products, top conversion sources, add-to-carts, removals and time to purchase. (Read from their published documentation and marketing pages, not their paid code.)
So the two tools point different ways here. Their PPC addon helps the ad networks attribute your sales. Squizzie brings the cost into your own reports.
What the orders table adds isn’t a better return on ad spend. Squizzie doesn’t attribute revenue to ads at all, and the one revenue figure it sets against spend is labelled Total Revenue against Google Ads Spend, not return on ad spend. What it adds is that your ad cost sits in the same report as your margins and your customer lifetime value (with Tracksies HQ), which an analytics property doesn’t know about.
You look after a lot of sites. Five-site licences, multisite, client licence management. If that’s your situation, it’s a clear fit.
You’d rather have the fixed reports. Sixteen reports designed by people who do this full time, ready on install, is a good offer. Building your own is only better when the ready-made one doesn’t ask your question.
Who Should Choose What
MonsterInsights is likely the better fit if you:
- Need Google Analytics installed on your site, which Squizzie doesn’t do.
- Want fixed, well-designed reports rather than composing your own.
- Care most about traffic sources, campaigns and attribution.
- Want survey, heatmap and NPS data alongside the analytics.
- Want an AI chat about your analytics inside the plugin.
- Run several sites, or client sites, under one licence.
Squizzie is likely the better fit if you:
- Want store numbers counted from your order tables rather than from tracking.
- Need Google data and store data in the same report, over the same dates.
- Want form entries counted from your own database, beside your traffic and your orders.
- 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 Search Console, Business Profile and PageSpeed in there too, instead of in other tabs.
- Already run other Tracksies plugins and want reviews, loyalty and support feeding the same reports.
Running Both
For this pairing, running both is the likely answer rather than a diplomatic one.
MonsterInsights puts GA4 on your site and reads Google’s view of it. Squizzie reads that same property back out and sits it beside your actual orders, forms and reviews, in a report you can send to someone. One fills the property, the other joins it to your shop’s own records. Nothing in either stops the other working.
If you’re already happy with MonsterInsights, the real question isn’t whether to switch. It’s whether you’ve ever needed a number that GA4 alone couldn’t give you.
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.
MonsterInsights: one of the most installed analytics plugins in WordPress, a free version on WordPress.org, and one of the smoothest ways to get GA4 onto a WordPress site. 14-day money-back guarantee.
