4 ms·

Anyone has tried this and www.piwik.org and could tell us what are the main strength and weaknesses of those ?

by patd 16y ago

mootothemax 16y ago
I'm just trialling OWA at this very minute, but a few key differences: OWA's interface is much more professional. Piwik's codebase appears to be a lot more stable. Goals in Piwik are pretty basic: for example, you can define a page that triggers a goal, but not a funnel like you can in OWA. It's easy enough to trigger a custom action in Piwik (e.g. logged when someone clicks on a PayPal button - just add an onclick="log me code"), but the display leads a lot to be desired. OWA seems much more polished in this regard. OWA apparently has click heat maps, something that Piwik lacks, but I'm still trying to find them in the interface ;) Those are my initial impressions. In short: OWA has the features, but Piwik's code is stabler.
- benologist 16y ago
  I saw the heatmaps link when I was looking at the screenshots: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/document_detail.png http://www.openwebanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/d...
- jamalex 16y ago
  There is actually an open-source clickheat plugin for Piwik: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/73 http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/73 It took a few steps to integrate it, but it's working fairly well for me.
gyardley 16y ago
Open Web Analytics offers a feature comparison page: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158 http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158 I'd be most concerned with scaling. Piwik doesn't really scale off a single server. Open Web Analytics lets you distribute the recording and queueing of events across multiple servers, but you still have to process stats on a single server. I'd stick with a hosted solution for any high-volume project - it'll be cheaper in the long run. I'd only make an exception if you need a feature that the hosted solutions don't offer, in which case it's probably time to suck it up and start building your own analytics. There is certainly room for open-source analytics designed with scalability in mind - perhaps with something like Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop as a backend.
- padams 16y ago
  As of v1.4.0 you can actually process the queues distributed on multiple machines locally. However, all the processors still talk to and deposit events into the same DB.
ahemphill 16y ago
I've got Piwik on a shared host (WebFaction tier 1) and while I like the software, I discovered its limit at one point last week with http://reasonstumblrwentdown.com http://reasonstumblrwentdown.com. (The site had about 25k uniques and 250k actions total.) It eventually recovered but I would definitely do some research and further configuration before running the package on a site with high traffic. One friend at a news site told me that they put Piwik on its own VPS before ditching it for performance issues. Whatever you decide to do, I would run in parallel a backup system from a proven and trusted provider — I scrambled to do so with Google Analytics once Piwik died.

Anyone has tried this and www.piwik.org and could tell us what are the main strength and weaknesses of those ?

by patd 16y ago

Anyone has tried this and www.piwik.org and could tell us what are the main strength and weaknesses of those ?

I'm just trialling OWA at this very minute, but a few key differences: OWA's interface is much more professional. Piwik's codebase appears to be a lot more stable. Goals in Piwik are pretty basic: for example, you can define a page that triggers a goal, but not a funnel like you can in OWA. It's easy enough to trigger a custom action in Piwik (e.g. logged when someone clicks on a PayPal button - just add an onclick="log me code"), but the display leads a lot to be desired. OWA seems much more polished in this regard. OWA apparently has click heat maps, something that Piwik lacks, but I'm still trying to find them in the interface ;) Those are my initial impressions. In short: OWA has the features, but Piwik's code is stabler.

benologist 16y ago
I saw the heatmaps link when I was looking at the screenshots: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/document_detail.png http://www.openwebanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/d...
jamalex 16y ago
There is actually an open-source clickheat plugin for Piwik: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/73 http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/73 It took a few steps to integrate it, but it's working fairly well for me.

gyardley 16y ago

Open Web Analytics offers a feature comparison page: http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158 http://www.openwebanalytics.com/?page_id=158 I'd be most concerned with scaling. Piwik doesn't really scale off a single server. Open Web Analytics lets you distribute the recording and queueing of events across multiple servers, but you still have to process stats on a single server. I'd stick with a hosted solution for any high-volume project - it'll be cheaper in the long run. I'd only make an exception if you need a feature that the hosted solutions don't offer, in which case it's probably time to suck it up and start building your own analytics. There is certainly room for open-source analytics designed with scalability in mind - perhaps with something like Cloudera's Distribution for Hadoop as a backend.

padams 16y ago
As of v1.4.0 you can actually process the queues distributed on multiple machines locally. However, all the processors still talk to and deposit events into the same DB.

ahemphill 16y ago

I've got Piwik on a shared host (WebFaction tier 1) and while I like the software, I discovered its limit at one point last week with http://reasonstumblrwentdown.com http://reasonstumblrwentdown.com. (The site had about 25k uniques and 250k actions total.) It eventually recovered but I would definitely do some research and further configuration before running the package on a site with high traffic. One friend at a news site told me that they put Piwik on its own VPS before ditching it for performance issues. Whatever you decide to do, I would run in parallel a backup system from a proven and trusted provider — I scrambled to do so with Google Analytics once Piwik died.