What do you think of piwik

[cssHTML]

Hi, we installed recently piwik for our website, a file search engine.
What is your impression? piwik is open source and free. In your opinion is it comparable or better than Google analytics?

Piwik is working nicely and gives good stats, but browser languages seem to be still missing.

[edited by: Receptional at 2:53 pm (utc) on Aug 26, 2011]
[edit reason] No links please. Not necessary for the post. [/edit]

[Receptional]

I use Piwik. It seems to be more stable on recept versions and does the job. What I really like (and the only reason we use it) is that we can store all the data on our own servers, instead of on thord party machines belonging to Google or Yahoo (And those are the ones we trust!). Some companies just cannot bring themselves to store their data with a third party, and (let's face it) if you are a bank you would probably be breaking several laws if you did. however - for the majority of users I don't think Piwik is the best solution - but it does the job :)

[robzilla]

Their 19kb (uncompressed) JavaScript file is certainly an improvement over the ever-growing ga.js (30kb and growing), but I couldn't seem to get used to their interface.

[Alex_TJ]

We're considering moving from Statcounter to Piwik. What's the speed like and its impact on page loading?

[onepointone]

I think I'll give piwik a try. I won't use GA, have just used awstats for a while now.

[djones]

>What's the speed like <
We store the data on our own machines, so the speed is pretty much in our own control. With very large amounts of data, it can get confused.

[Alex_TJ]

Thanks djones, and welcome.
I noticed on their forums they were talking about DBs in the GBs, so I suppose it also depends on how good you are setting up.
I was asking because we're on shared hosting - anyone have any load times they want to share or experiences with piwik on shared hosting?

[djones]

To be clear - it seems to have no noticeable effect on page loads. The issues come when analyzing the data. Storing anlytics data can make it quite hard to crunch. But then we are looking at a site with quite a large number of intensive users on our system.

[Alex_TJ]

Good to hear. Before we changed to Statcounter a couple of years ago it took longer for GA than the rest of the entire page to load.
There doesn't appear to be any downsides at all for our size of site - surely I'm missing something?