juuna

Compare

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 twelve 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: $15 / $25 / $55 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.

§

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.

Start your instanceExplore the live demo