Google Analytics vs Piwik

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Google Analytics

121.7K
44.9K
+ 1
5K
Piwik

1.4K
512
+ 1
74
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Google Analytics vs Piwik: What are the differences?

Google Analytics: Enterprise-class web analytics. Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications; Piwik: The ultimate open source alternative to Google Analytics. Piwik is a full featured PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. Piwik aims to be a Free software alternative to Google Analytics, and is already used on more than 1,000,000 websites. Privacy is built-in!.

Google Analytics and Piwik belong to "General Analytics" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Google Analytics are:

  • Analysis Tools- Google Analytics is built on a powerful, easy to use, reporting platform, so you can decide what data you want to view and customize your reports, with just a few clicks.
  • Content Analytics- Content reports help you understand which parts of your website are performing well, which pages are most popular so you can create a better experience for your customers.
  • Social Analytics- The web is a social place and Google Analytics measures success of your social media programs. You can analyze how visitors interact with sharing features on your site (like the Google +1 button) and engage with your content across social platforms.

On the other hand, Piwik provides the following key features:

  • Real time data updates
  • Customizable Dashboard
  • All Websites Dashboard

"Free" is the top reason why over 1479 developers like Google Analytics, while over 34 developers mention "It's good to have an alternative to google analytics" as the leading cause for choosing Piwik.

Piwik is an open source tool with 11.3K GitHub stars and 1.78K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Piwik's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Google Analytics has a broader approval, being mentioned in 15298 company stacks & 2385 developers stacks; compared to Piwik, which is listed in 816 company stacks and 102 developer stacks.

Advice on Google Analytics and Piwik

I'm looking to switch from Google Analytics to other more privacy compliant analytics tools. My ideal tool would have the basics (visits, pageviews, duration, rebound rate, source/medium) and more: breakdown by page, conversion goals, campaigns set-up... But I'm a bit confused by the different choices, and I would greatly appreciate any feedback ;)

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
MatomoMatomo

This is probably one of the easiest tools to customize to your needs. It's open source so you can host your own instance of it making it very affordable and it has plenty of privacy tools including honoring do not track requests on a server side basis so no additional coding necessary and you can easily tell it to anonymity guest ip addresses so there would be no way of a breach compromising the integrity of your privacy goals

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Recommends
at

I am playing right now with Plaisible. I have install it in a docker container with an nginx reverse proxy and is fast. It has all the basic features and you can add even gols. It is lightwaith but is not having the Google Analytics features or Matomo. You ca try it and see if it jas what you need, till now I am happy.

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Decisions about Google Analytics and Piwik

Caring about privacy I've chosen to go with self-hosted Ackee analytics for incoming traffic analytics and ahoy ruby gem to build inside-app analytics. Still getting Caring about privacy I've chosen to go with self-hosted Ackee analytics for incoming traffic analytics and ahoy ruby gem to build inside-app analytics. Still getting a plenty of data without sending visitors' information to Google

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Dennis Paulus
Founder, Software Engineer & Product Manager at BlazingMedia · | 7 upvotes · 17.1K views

We have integrated Panelbear on our Website, rather than Google Analytics, because it is way more respecting of the User's Privacy. Whilst Google Analytics gives us in-depth information on virtually everything, we don't even need that much. Panelbear keeps it simple and in addition to that, displays the data well structured in a simple and intuitive dashboard

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