The Google Analytics alternative for side projects

You added Google Analytics to your project because it’s free and it’s what everyone uses. Then GA4 arrived, the interface turned into a maze of explorations and dimensions, and checking how many people visited yesterday became a three‑click chore. Somewhere along the way you also added a cookie consent banner, because GA4 sets cookies and the law says you have to ask.

For a side project, that’s a lot of overhead for a number you glance at once a day. This guide walks through replacing GA4 with Janus: a lightweight, privacy‑first Google Analytics alternative built for developers and indie builders rather than marketing teams. You’ll remove gtag.js, port your custom events one‑to‑one, and drop the consent banner — without losing the metrics you actually check.

The whole migration takes about ten minutes. If you’d rather start from scratch, add Janus to your side project in 5 minutes instead. Otherwise, read on.

Janus covers what most side projects actually use: page views, custom events, referrers and UTM sources, audience and geography breakdowns, and a live event log you can search. It leaves out the parts of GA4 that exist to serve advertising — which, on a side project, is most of them.

On a side project you inherit that complexity without the use case. GA4’s reports are shaped around explorations and comparisons you never run. Data can take 24 to 48 hours to finish processing. High‑traffic reports get sampled, so the numbers you see are estimates. And the one question you usually have — "did more people show up today than yesterday, and where did they come from?" — takes more clicks than it should.

Then there’s the cookie banner. GA4 sets cookies to identify returning visitors, and under the EU’s ePrivacy Directive, analytics cookies require consent. So you bolt on a consent management platform, users click through a popup before they see your work, and a meaningful share opt out — which means the data you went to all this trouble for is now incomplete anyway.

There’s also a compliance question that hasn’t fully settled. Between 2022 and 2023, data protection authorities in Austria, France, and Italy ruled that specific Google Analytics configurations violated GDPR by transferring EU visitor data to the US. Google has since shipped mitigations, but the episode is a reminder that a free tool can carry costs that don’t show up until later. A privacy‑first alternative that never stores IP addresses sidesteps the question entirely.

If you run paid ad campaigns, that list tilts toward GA4 — keep reading to the trade‑offs section. For everything else a side project needs, the lighter tool wins on speed and simplicity.

<script src="https://addjanus.ca/janus.js"></script>
<script>
    Janus.init('jns_your_api_key_here');
</script>

Page views and SPA navigation are tracked automatically — no route listeners needed. If you don’t have an API key yet, add Janus in 5 minutes and come back. Using a framework? There are dedicated guides for Next.js and every major framework in the docs.

<!-- Remove these two tags -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXXXX"></script>
<script>
    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
    function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
    gtag('js', new Date());
    gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXXXX');
</script>

If you use Google Tag Manager as a container for GA4 and nothing else, you can remove that too. And if Google Analytics was the only reason you showed a cookie banner, delete the consent popup — Janus doesn’t set cookies, so there’s nothing to consent to.

One mapping worth understanding before you port events: GA4 and Janus both use an event‑based model, which makes the translation clean. In GA4 everything is an event with parameters. In Janus everything is an event with a name and a properties object. There’s no legacy category/action/label baggage to untangle — a gtag('event', name, params) call becomes a Janus.track(name, properties) call, and the shape carries over.

// Before — Google Analytics
gtag('event', 'signup_click', {
    plan: 'pro',
    location: 'hero'
});

// After — Janus
Janus.track('signup_click', {
    plan: 'pro',
    location: 'hero'
});

Custom dimensions in GA4 become regular properties on Janus.track. There’s no need to register them in an admin panel first — whatever you put in the properties object is stored and searchable. The event log filters by name and by property, so Janus.track('checkout_started', { plan: 'pro' }) is immediately queryable by both checkout_started and plan = pro.

// GA4 recommended events → Janus.track()
gtag('event', 'sign_up', { method: 'google' });
Janus.track('sign_up', { method: 'google' });

gtag('event', 'purchase', { value: 29, currency: 'USD' });
Janus.track('purchase', { value: 29, currency: 'USD' });

gtag('event', 'select_content', { content_type: 'pricing' });
Janus.track('select_content', { content_type: 'pricing' });

// Manual page view (Janus tracks these automatically,
// but you can send one explicitly if you need to)
Janus.page();

If you identify logged‑in users, GA4’s user_id maps to Janus.identify('user_123'). Call it after login to tie subsequent events to that user, and Janus.reset() on logout. Both are covered in the API reference. Keep payloads under 10 KB per event, and use verb_noun names — signup_completed, checkout_started — to keep the log scannable.

Open your Janus dashboard and load your site in another tab. The page view should appear in the live activity within a second or two. Trigger one of your ported events — click the signup button, start a checkout — and confirm it lands in the event log with the right properties. Because Janus doesn’t sample or batch‑delay, what you do shows up immediately, which makes verification fast.

If you want to be thorough, run Janus and GA4 side by side for a week before removing the Google tag. Both scripts coexist without conflict. Comparing the two sets of numbers over the same period tells you exactly what, if anything, changes — usually Janus reports slightly higher visitor counts because it isn’t losing the users who declined the GA cookie banner.

For a side project, these rarely change the decisions you make. You want to know whether traffic is growing, where it comes from, and which events fire. If your project grows into something that runs paid acquisition, you can always run GA alongside Janus on the specific pages where ads convert, and keep Janus for everything else.

One more thing to plan for: historical data doesn’t transfer. Your GA data stays in your Google account, and Janus starts fresh from the moment you install it. If you care about comparing periods that straddle the switch, export your GA4 reports before you remove the tag.

That makes the privacy story short enough to explain in a sentence, which is worth something on a project where you’d rather not maintain a compliance surface. Read the details on the privacy page or the reasoning behind the design in why we built Janus this way.

Once you’ve switched, connect Janus to your AI coding agent and check your traffic without leaving the editor — or set up conversion funnels to see where visitors drop off.

Swap out GA in under ten minutes.

Free tier. No credit card. No consent banner needed.

Get started with Janus