Bitly (Bit.ly) is one of the most popular link shortening tools. The vendor says it shortens 1 billion links per month. The company is privately held, based in New York City, and was founded in 2008.
$35
per month
Matomo Analytics
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
Piwik is an open source analytics platform that enables users to measure web and mobile apps as well as intranet portals. It protects the privacy of users through advanced privacy features and its approach to data ownership. Piwik offers On-premises and Cloud deployment options.
Available in over 50 languages, it is fully customisable and vendor-independent. Piwik offers over 70 integrations with Content Management Systems, Ecommerce solutions, Forums as well as other mobile and web platforms.…
$0
Pricing
Bitly
Matomo Analytics
Editions & Modules
Basic
$35
per month
Free
Free
Customized
Contact sales team
Free download (open source)
$0
Free 30 day trial
$0
limited to 30 days
Essential
$9
number of pageviews (monthly traffic)
Business
$29
number of pageviews (monthly traffic)
Enterprise
$199
your requirements and monthly traffic
Content Optimization Bundle
$579
per installation
Growth Bundle
$1,149
per installation
Premium Bundle
$1,499
per installation
Email Support Subscription
$2,090
per installation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bitly
Matomo Analytics
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
On-premise Edition is free to download and install on one's own servers.
Generally I would recommend. If you are doing a tiny amount of volume (price sensitive and/or your team needs hands on support) you may be better served elsewhere, but I don't think you're going to get the easy of use and feature set that you would with Bitly. We have found that our user base is also used to seeing Bitly-shortened links in their daily browsing, so are less reticent to click a URL that isn't on our domain
Matomo is a full-fledged website tracking and analytics tool. It offers everything and then a bit more that GA has to offer. I cannot conceive of any situation where this programme would be "less appropriate". You can use it for each and every website and do well with it. The data it provides includes everything you could wish for (country, IP, new user or not, actions taken, goals achieved etc.)
One of Piwik's strengths is the provision of customizable widgets for different bits of analytics data. The ability to add and remove them, change dates and more makes this a flexible way to visualize data.
The visitor log section is also rich, providing date, keywords, actions and more in a single table, which makes it easy to identify your most effective content.
And the visitor actions table includes both bounce rate and time on site, so you can quickly tell which pages have the most engagement.
Data display is a strength for Piwik, as you have access to overview charts while simultaneously being able to drill deeper.
One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
From a user security standpoint it would be useful to provide users the ability to have two-factor authentication. While stats data is not necessarily sensitive in aggregate, some users may feel that certain portions need to be more secure.
It would be nice if there was a tighter integration with the Google search/referrer API so that "keyword not defined" would be replaced more often with the actual keyword that is being used to send a visitor to a site.
An easier branding method, maybe in the form of an API function set, that pulled branding URLs from a set of database fields would be great as well.
At this point, there is not a single conceivable reason as to why we would not renew and continue to use Piwik Analytics. Especially since it is a free program and open source. The product will only get better over time as more people look into it and donate to cause so that development can continue.
Using Bitly to create shareable, trackable short links for social media couldn't be easier. Bitly is super easy to manage and offers easy monitoring of short links. Even with the few shortcomings or cumbersome features, Bitly is ranked number 1 for shortening links for our organization because of how simple it is to use.
Piwik succeeds in presenting me (and my associates and my clients...) large amounts of data in a user friendly way. The interface and functionality can easily be customized. While some enhancements do need technical background (API calls by programming language from the webserver or javascript), others are easy to use (goal / event tracking)
I've witnessed very little availability issues with Bitly. This includes very rare occurrences of application errors and unplanned outages, of which I very much appreciate. When there are application errors or outages, Bitly does a great job of handling the issues in a timely manner and I am rarely out of the site for long at all. This is great, considering I was using Bitly for nearly every link that was posted to our social media accounts.
I have used Bitly's service on a variety of computers, systems, and browsers. With this being said, I have not noticed much of a change at all between the browsers and computers, and Bitly's performance is top notch. Reports are also completed in a reasonable time frame, and I have had very little problem with lag time on loading different pages on the site. Pages tend to load quite quickly.
For us, Bitly is a Godsend an an almost perfect solution. I have no complaints and would recommend them to almost anyone. I guess I would hold back from a 10/10 because short URLs can sometimes look spammy. For us, and what we need it for, it's just about perfect!
The best thing about the Matomo support is that they have a forum which basically you can find the answer to almost all of your questions and most of the time you don't need to contact them regarding your questions and problems but if you need help they will answer in a reasonable time slots.
I did not receive any in-person training, as I felt that I didn't need this type of training in order to understand and learn Bitly. It was quite easy for me to explore Bitly and learn the features myself without needing a person to give me a demo or tutorial. Kudos to making a platform that is very straightforward.
I haven't experienced direct online training - However, several times while learning Bitly by myself I went to the main Bitly page to answer a few questions I had. This includes determining exactly what features I was receiving and then I would explore the website and find these features. Also, I went to the Enterprise tab when both deciding to purchase that upgrade, as well as after I purchased this upgrade. It was very helpful in learning exactly what came with that package and after the upgrade, I was able to look there and learn some of the aspects of the upgrade that I was missing
Very excited to use bitly for link tracing - I was very excited to begin using Bitly for this company, and I've had very favorable impressions of using Bitly in the past for a variety of different jobs. Knowing the amount clicks on each link is important for our overall strategy.
We use Pretty Links for custom URLs from our Word Press website. When that is not possible because the URL doesn't originate from the website, we use Bitly. It definitely has a purpose in our day-to-day operations. We also appreciate the information you receive like total clicks, top referrer and top location.
We have used Google Analytics before for one of our online tools and we switched to Matomo for the other web applications we have. We did that because Matomo is free but mostly since we wanted us to own the data on these sensitive apps and not share it with third parties. Since we have the data locally, we can now apply machine learning techniques to improve the systems even more.
Bitly's scalability is great. When I began using it, I only used it once in a while to promote blog articles from our WordPress site on Twitter. This was due to Twitter's character limit and URL shortening was necessary. However, once I became more familiar with it and started seeing the benefits of many of Bitly's features, I began using it for nearly every link I posted across all of our social media accounts. This increased the workload I filtered through Bitly, and we also upgraded from free to a paid account. This growth was handled very well by Bitly and I was very pleased with its ability to scale so easily.
By using Piwik, we can better identify keywords used to search for the website and by targeting those keywords on search engine advertising (Google, Bing, Yahoo), it helps with conversion and also saves us money by cutting down guess work.
By using Piwik graphs, it helps to save our employees time in creating pie charts and bar charts to present to upper management.
Since Piwik is free to use, there is no reason not to implement it. Most likely, with your website, you will already have access to SQL and hosting package. There is minimal cost to implementing Piwik.
