Is there much difference between an analog vs digital anti-aliasing filter?

I am trying to use MATLAB to simulate a device that measures electric current, passes it through an analog butterworth filter (anti-aliasing), and then does some digital filtering and computation. I know the latter part of the problem, but I'm confused about how one can simulate the analog filter portion. My experience is not in filtering so I was hoping to get a nudge from someone in the right direction.

The butterworth filter should be order 4 with cutoff frequency fc. There is an example of creating an analog butterworth using the butter function here: https://www.mathworks.com/help/signal/ref/butter.html. But I don't believe you can apply this analog filter to the incoming sampled (digital) data? Would I need to use the function bilinear? Or should I just create a digital butterworth filter instead. I don't have any real requirements for ripple or anything.

Thank you.