The one-line difference
Web analytics measures traffic: how many people visited, where they came from, what pages they saw. Product analytics measures behavior: what people do inside your product, whether they convert, and whether they come back. Web analytics is page- and session-centric; product analytics is event- and person-centric.
What web analytics is good at
Web analytics shines for marketing and content: traffic volume, acquisition channels, referrers, top pages, bounce, and geography. It’s usually lightweight to run and, in privacy-first tools like Plausible or Umami, cookieless. If your question is “is our marketing working and where is traffic coming from?”, web analytics answers it. For a fuller picture, see the open source analytics tools rundown.
What product analytics is good at
Product analytics works on events tied to a person. That unlocks questions web analytics can’t touch:
- Funnels — where do users drop off between signup and activation?
- Retention — do people come back a week or a month later?
- User flows — what paths do users actually take through the product?
- Profiles — what has this specific person done, across sessions and devices?
The deeper mechanics — autocapture, identity resolution, and the insight types — are covered in the open source product analytics guide.
Why teams run both
The two aren’t competitors; they serve different teams and stages. Marketing optimises acquisition with web analytics; product optimises activation and retention with product analytics. A common setup is a lightweight web-analytics tool on the marketing site and a product-analytics tool inside the app. If you’re consolidating or moving off Google Analytics, weigh both needs — the GA alternative comparison and the self-hosted analytics page can help you decide.