Alexa Internet (discontinued) vs. Request Metrics

I recommend Alexa for small businesses where you don't need much customization. Otherwise, I think big companies should implement their own tools.

Incentivized

Request Metrics is great for small web development teams that want to make fast web applications. It was quick for us to get started and we could use the reports right away without having to read through documentation. If you just need to get some performance metrics, Request Metrics is perfect. It would not be so good for a larger team or a complex backend application as it is pretty limited in what it can measure.

• It sources website analytics for most websites we're interested in tracking.
• Each website's dashboard is easy to understand and pull numbers from.
• We can get very nitty gritty with the numbers we're pulling or keep it simple by just pulling basic website visitor stats.

Incentivized

• Performance charts are really simple and easy for us to understand what is happening
• It was easy to get started and doesn't need administration or training
• It's affordable for our team
• It's fast

• Hidden costs may end up losing lot of money, Pricing model is not good
• API calls fail sometimes
• Website suggestions are irrelevant sometimes

Incentivized

• I wish that it could also do uptime checking of the site
• There is not enough detail to drill into individual users

It is well structured for Internet analytics and traffic data.

Incentivized

If you want to focus only on your own web analytics, then Google Analytics is the way to go as no product will give you more accurate data. However, what Google Analytics cannot do is the competitive analysis functionality, which is where a product like Alexa comes in. It's about on par with SimilarWeb in many ways, they just go about the analytics in slightly different ways. Really, it comes down to personal preference as to which you prefer. Thankfully both offer free trials so you can test out the platforms before fully committing. SimilarWeb may be a bit better in terms of mobile web data.

Incentivized

We also consider Speedcurve and Calibre for monitoring. Speedcurve was really nice, but the reports were slow. We had to wait a lot to get information. It was also out of our budget and would require extra justification to use it. Calibre was also nice, but the numbers were based on synthetic rather than real user performance. We felt that this wasn't as helpful for us.

• I am ready to write a full blown Alexa skill application to make money
• I got exposed to the Web development environment of Amazon web service by learning Alexa

Incentivized

• The launch of our project dashboard was much smoother and more successful because we could fix problems earlier
• It fit without our existing operations budget