Matomo Analytics vs. Smartlook

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

Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.

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.

• Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
• Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
• Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.

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.

• I feel nickel and dimed with the events and funnels.
• We came from sessions being 30 mins of inactivity and now it's 5-10 mins. Session count has gone up significantly which we weren't prepared for.
• Recording playback isn't as clean and maneuverable like FullStory.

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.

As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.

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)

Every page, the tool setup pages and dashboards are built very well, the site structure is perfectly designed and intuitive to use. All functions are well documented and the help sections are really everywhere, you don't have to search for answers, as they are just popped up or max. a click away for your service.

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

Sofia P. is being our point of contact with the issues we faced. I was unsure about how to explain to her what was going on with the recording numbers (the recording has stopped before we were expecting to), but she readily understood and came with a solution for us in the same day. The problem was blocking our developer to test the integration, so it was great to have support so fast that he could continue his work.

Incentivized

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

It is much more robust out of the box, easier to set up and more intuitive to use. The reports are set up already and it requires little to no setup after installation to start gathering insights.

It has been a year between the time when I last used Hotjar and first started using Smartlook. I would say both tools are more or less equal when it comes to features, the only 2 differences I can think of are - price and customer support. Smartlook is cheaper and has superior customer services. You have the feeling when interacting with them that they genuinely care.

Incentivized

• We can see the analytics of our web applications and thus having the insight of the systems' behavior.
• It helps in improving the performance and scalability of our web application.
• It helps us improve the user experience on our sites; seeing the user's activity we can take decisions to make it better.
• A cost-effective tool, since it is free.

Incentivized

• Smartlook is used by different individuals from different organizations to have insights into different parts of products. It is used as the sole developer of our website as well as marketing campaigns.
• Smartlook has an amazing feature which is tracking the activities of return users.
• It gives reliable and efficient services.

Incentivized