Comparison
Plask or Geckoboard for watching GA4
By Torstein Skulbru ·
Geckoboard is a live KPI dashboard built for office TVs: GA4 widgets refresh about every 20 minutes, and threshold notifications go to Slack or Teams from $79/mo. Plask is a daily monitor for makers with several products: GA4 traffic next to Stripe and RevenueCat revenue and your costs, statistical anomaly alerts with AI root cause, and a Monday digest, free for one product and $5/mo for Pro. If you want numbers on a wall, choose Geckoboard. If you want to be told when a product drops and why, choose Plask.
At a glance
| Geckoboard | Plask | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Live KPI dashboards for TVs, Slack, and email | Daily per-product P&L with anomaly alerts |
| Free plan | No (14-day trial) | Yes, 1 product |
| Paid plans | Essentials $79/mo (2 dashboards, 1 editor); Performance $319/mo (20 dashboards, 3 editors) | Pro $5/mo or $48/yr (unlimited products) |
| GA4 data freshness | About every 20 minutes; realtime widgets every minute | Four times a day |
| Anomaly detection | No | Modified Z-score on MAD, 3 sensitivity levels |
| Threshold notifications | Status indicators to Slack or Teams (Performance plan) | No |
| Email alerts | No (scheduled snapshots only) | Yes (Pro), warning and critical |
| Slack / Discord | Slack and Teams notifications; Slack snapshots | Slack and Discord webhooks (Pro) |
| Scheduled reports | Dashboard snapshots by email, Slack, Teams | Weekly digest with Focus cards (Pro), monthly on Free |
| Root cause / AI | No AI analysis (MCP access to metrics only) | AI root cause per alert, one-line Focus card explanations, MCP server (Pro) |
| Multi-property | Multiple GA accounts and properties on one dashboard | Every product in one portfolio view (Pro) |
| Other data sources | Dozens of integrations | GA4 only |
| TV mode | Yes, the core use case | No |
These tools do different jobs
It is tempting to line them up feature by feature, but the honest framing is that Geckoboard and Plask answer different questions. Geckoboard answers "what are the numbers right now?" in a way a whole room can see. Plask answers "did anything change that I should know about?" in a way one person can read in thirty seconds over coffee. A support team watching ticket volume and a founder tracking six side projects want different things.
Where Geckoboard wins
- Live data. Most GA4 widgets refresh around every 20 minutes and realtime widgets every minute. Plask refreshes four times a day and checks for anomalies once a day. If you are watching a launch unfold, Geckoboard shows it; Plask tells you about it the next morning.
- Wall displays. TV mode, dashboard loops, screen management, and designed-for-distance widgets. This is Geckoboard's origin and it is very good at it.
- Many sources on one board. Dozens of integrations, so GA4 sits next to Zendesk, Stripe, or a spreadsheet.
- Microsoft Teams. Threshold notifications and snapshots can go to Teams, which Plask does not support.
- Scheduled snapshots of a dashboard to email, Slack, or Teams on a daily, weekday, or monthly cadence, included from the Essentials plan.
Where Plask wins
- Statistical detection. Geckoboard's notifications fire when a number crosses a fixed line you set. Plask compares each day with the previous 28 days (same weekday where possible) using median and MAD, so a normal weekend does not page you and a real 35% drop does. Sensitivity is adjustable per product.
- Email alerts. Geckoboard has no email notification channel for threshold breaches, only scheduled snapshots. Plask emails warning and critical alerts on Pro.
- The "why". Plask's AI root cause attaches a short explanation to each warning and critical alert, based on channel, device, and country breakdowns pulled from GA4 for the anomaly day. Geckoboard shows the number changed and leaves the investigation to you.
- Weekly focus. The Monday digest picks up to three products that need you, with the evidence behind each, rather than sending a picture of a dashboard.
- Price and a free tier. $0 for one product, $5/mo for all of them. Geckoboard starts at $79/mo with no free plan, and threshold notifications require the $319/mo Performance plan.
- Discord. Useful for indie and game developers who run communities there.
Pricing detail
| Geckoboard Essentials | Geckoboard Performance | Plask Pro | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price (annual billing) | $79 | $319 | $4 ($48/yr) |
| Dashboards | 2 (+$24 each) | 20 | 1 portfolio view (+ opt-in public profile) |
| Editors | 1 (+$20 each) | 3 | 1 |
| Threshold notifications | No | Slack and Teams | No |
| Anomaly alerts | No | No | Email, Slack, Discord |
| AI analysis | No | No | Root cause, Focus card explanations, MCP |
| Free tier | 14-day trial | 14-day trial | Yes, 1 product |
Who should choose which
Choose Geckoboard if you have a screen on a wall, you want live numbers from several systems, or your team works in Microsoft Teams. It is a mature product for exactly that.
Choose Plask if your products are checked by one or two people who mainly want to catch drops and understand them, and who would rather receive a Slack message or a Monday email than look at a dashboard. Start with the free tier and read how detection works on the features page. For a comparison against a closer competitor, see Plask vs Databox.
Questions
- Does Geckoboard have anomaly detection for Google Analytics?
- No. Geckoboard's notifications are threshold-based: you set warning and success states on a Number or Gauge widget via Status indicators, and it posts to Slack or Microsoft Teams when a value crosses them. There is no statistical anomaly detection and no email alert channel. Plask uses a modified Z-score on a 28-day baseline and delivers by email, Slack, and Discord.
- Is Geckoboard cheaper than Plask?
- No. On 2026-09-08 Geckoboard's pricing page listed Essentials at $79/mo and Performance at $319/mo on annual billing, with a 14-day trial and no free plan. Plask is free for one product and $5/mo or $48/yr for Pro. Geckoboard's price buys a live, multi-source, TV-ready dashboard, which Plask does not offer.
- Can I put Plask on an office TV?
- Plask's dashboard is a normal web page and works on a large screen, but it is not designed for it: there is no TV mode, no auto-rotation, and data refreshes four times a day rather than every 20 minutes. If a wall display is the goal, Geckoboard is the better tool.
- Can I use both?
- Yes, and some teams do. Geckoboard shows live GA4 numbers on a screen where everyone sees them, while Plask watches the daily figures statistically and explains anomalies. They connect to GA4 independently with read-only access and do not interfere with each other.
Related reading
Monitoring without the wall screen
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