Compare · updated 2026-08-31
03 · The field
juuna vsGoogle Analytics.
Google Analytics is the default. It is free, it is everywhere, and it is built around advertising. Your data is processed in Google’s cloud, and most product questions take a custom Exploration to answer.
juuna is the opposite trade. It is paid, deliberately small, and runs on a dedicated instance you control. There are real reasons to pick either. Here they are.
Their case
Choose Google Analytics if…
- You need free at any scale. GA4 costs nothing at volumes juuna charges real money for.
- Your analytics exist to feed Google Ads. Conversion import, audiences and bidding are first-class there and absent here.
- You want raw-data export to BigQuery and are happy building your own analysis on top.
- Your analysts are fluent in GA4’s model and there is no appetite to move.
Ours
Choose juuna if…
- You want session replay, heatmaps and Core Web Vitals in the same tool as your traffic. GA4 offers none of them.
- You want your product’s data on a server nobody else rents. GA4 processes your data inside Google’s cloud. Every juuna customer gets their own machine and their own Postgres.
- You would rather read a dashboard than build one. juuna has fourteen views and no query language.
- You want funnels, retention cohorts and user flow that render on sight, on a bill you can predict a year out.
I
Side by side
- Hosting model
- A dedicated instance per customer: own server, own Postgres
- Google’s multi-tenant cloud
- Pricing
- Flat: $29 / $79 / $199 per month, everything included
- Free; GA360 by enterprise contract
- Session replay
- Included, masked by default, live or recorded
- Not offered
- Heatmaps
- Click, scroll and attention maps over captures of the real page
- Not offered
- Core Web Vitals
- LCP, CLS, INP, FCP, TTFB as daily p75s, ranked by page
- Not offered (separate tooling)
- Funnels & retention
- Included on every plan
- Built by hand in Explorations
- What happens to your data
- Yours alone. Never mined, never shared, instance destroyed on exit
- Processed by Google; feeds its ads ecosystem where linked
- Sampling
- None. Your instance queries your own Postgres
- Explorations can sample on large date ranges
- Raw-event retention
- Default 90 days raw, aggregates kept without identifiers
- User-level data capped at 14 months
- Third parties involved
- None
- Google, structurally
II
The real difference
Google Analytics is free because your use of it is worth something to Google’s wider business. juuna is paid because the subscription is the entire relationship, which is what keeps the tool answerable to you.
If what you need is an advertising pipeline, use GA. That is what it is for. If what you need is to understand your product while the data stays on your own server, that is what juuna is for.
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Asked and answered
- Is juuna a drop-in replacement for Google Analytics?
- For traffic and product analytics, yes: pageviews, sources, campaigns, realtime, funnels and retention come standard, plus session replay, heatmaps and Web Vitals that GA4 does not have. What juuna does not do is advertising. There is no Google Ads integration and no ad audiences.
- Do I still need a cookie banner with juuna?
- juuna sets no third-party cookies and uses no advertising identifiers. Visitors are counted with a random first-party identifier that never crosses sites. Whether your jurisdiction requires consent for that is a question for your counsel, but a first-party tool with no ad tech keeps the conversation short.
- Can I run juuna alongside GA4 while I decide?
- Yes. The tag is 1.0 KB gzipped, has no dependencies, and coexists with anything. Teams usually run both for a few weeks and compare the numbers before turning one off.
See it with your own traffic.
Flat plans, everything included. Checkout to live dashboard usually takes about ten minutes.