Piwik,open source analytics, a great alternative to Google Analytics

piwik.org

10 points·yeahyeahs··5 comments

I've used it in the past. It's not as elaborate as Google Analytics. It's nice but I wouldn't use for anything serious or business oriented. If you have some personal sites or if you're really paranoid about your data its an OK solution. Needs some work on the UI though, it's design is bit clunky.

How long ago did you use it? They've redesigned the UI which is far better than the old one. Although it is true they're not as good as GA yet, it's only because the team is small. The codebase is a pleasure to work with should you need to customize anything, which you cannot do in GA.

In short, Piwik wins in terms of control hands down. If you don't need live analytics, don't want to store the data, want somebody else to blame if anything goes wrong, then go for GA. Not that I hate GA, I use both; normally GA to be my go-to backup if anything went wrong with my analytics server.

You can give it a quick try using Bitnami (its free, I am one of the developers) http://bitnami.org/stack/piwik It includes Piwik and all of its dependencies (Apache, MySQL, PHP) into a single, easy to use installer, vmware vm or amazon machine image. In particular the AMI is very popular together with the Amazon free tier because you can have a free micro instance running all the time with Piwik (which you want if you are using it to run analytics on your production servers)

Nice software, but no IP information, why not?

What do you mean no IP information? You get to store everything. Then there's filter plugin to mask IPs if your law requires you to do so.

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