GitLab vs. Matomo Analytics

GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.

Incentivized

If you want to balance data-driven marketing and a privacy-minded approach to analytics, Matomo Analytics is for you. It's easy to be compliant with GDPR and other regulations while still having detailed (anonymized) analytics that help inform what content is resonating vs what content is not resonating. And of course you also get all of the rich referral, campaign, and goal conversion data to help you optimize your marketing.

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• 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.

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

• 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.

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

Incentivized

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.

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

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)

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Only one hiccup when we were using a beta installation. Other than that, smooth sailing.

Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
• Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
• Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Incentivized

• 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.