“Easy Google AdSense” and “Site Kit by Google” (for WordPress) serve overlapping but quite different purposes. Which is better depends on what you actually want to do.
What they are
Easy Google AdSense is a lightweight plugin whose main (or sole) job is to help you insert AdSense ad code into your WordPress site without editing theme files. It leans heavily on the AdSense “Auto Ads” feature to automatically place ads for you.
Site Kit by Google is a more comprehensive “Google tools aggregator” plugin. It lets you connect various Google products (Search Console, Analytics, AdSense, PageSpeed Insights, Tag Manager) and view their metrics from your WordPress dashboard, plus it can automatically insert some AdSense code.
What you get
With Easy Google AdSense, you mostly get:
- Automatic insertion of AdSense Auto Ads (you give your Publisher ID, and it handles the rest)
- Option to generate the
ads.txtfile automatically - Fewer settings, less complexity, minimal control beyond letting Google decide placements
With Site Kit, you get:
- A unified dashboard showing insights from multiple Google services: how people find your site (Search Console), how visitors behave (Analytics), ad revenue (AdSense), site performance (PageSpeed Insights)
- Automatic insertion of AdSense code (if you enable the AdSense module)
- The ability to connect Google Tag Manager (without manually editing theme files)
- Granular permissions (so different WordPress users/admins can have different access to Google data)
Strengths vs trade-offs
Easy Google AdSense is ultra simple. If your goal is just to show ads with minimal fuss and you don’t care about seeing many analytics or using multiple Google tools from within WordPress, it’s appealing. The downside is you lose flexibility. You’re largely trusting Google’s automatic placement decisions, and you don’t get rich in-dashboard analytics or integration with other Google services.
Site Kit gives you more value if you want to monitor performance, understand user behavior, and centralize multiple Google tools. But its ad-placement capabilities are more basic compared to a dedicated ad plugin. It is often enough for many sites, but less flexible for fine-tuning.
One criticism is that for serious ad placement control (e.g. “I want this ad here, that ad there, vary by post type”) you might still need a dedicated ad/ads management plugin even if you use Site Kit.
Also, because Site Kit is more ambitious in scope, there’s slightly more overhead, and for small/simple sites the extra features might be overkill.
Which one to pick
If your priority is “just get ads running with zero hassle,” Easy Google AdSense is attractive. If your goal is “I want data, insights, multiple Google tools in one place, and modest control over ads,” then Site Kit is more useful.
If you want the “sweet spot,” you could even combine: use Site Kit for analytics, search console, etc., and still use a more feature-rich ad plugin (or Easy Google AdSense) just for the ad placement piece.