Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik) Reviews

With Matomo Analytics you have total control of your platform, whereas with Google Analytics you never know how they'll be using your data. Being an open source platform allows you to build plugins and themes for this great platform. Some of the users have already build some plugins freely available and some are commercial.

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.

I have used Google Analytics in the past and still do for our clients who wish to use it, although I am not absolutely familiar with its features. AWStats & Urchin of course analyze the raw server logs, but are not as feature rich or configurable as Piwik.

I have used Google Analytics, Site Catalyst, and Awstats as well as Piwik. There are some features that Google Analytics and Site Catalyst have that aren't available currently in Piwik, but most of those I don't currently need. Owning my data is more important to me than bells and whistles. Piwik is a modern analytics package that beats old school Apache log parsers like AwStats hands down.

To be honest, I did not notice much of a difference between Piwik and Google Analytics, but I only provisioned the installation and added the users. Another team was processing the data from Piwik.

I have used a number of analytics products, including Google Analytics, Clicky and GoSquared. The winning feature of Piwik is the compact, rich data tables, which make it a good addition to the analytics mix. While I'm not throwing out the others, I've continued to find Piwik useful.

We are a pretty small company and even smaller Marketing shop. We use tools from both Google and Bing but have not had the financial freedom to explore additional tools out there. I have looked at Moz and would really like to evaluate that one at some point. For real hard-core Analytics, look into the Adobe products such as Business Catalyst. I had the opportunity to experience that for a little while at a previous employer.

Moz is not directly a competitor, but it lacked (and still lacks) Piwik integration. Compared with Google Analytics the most important advantage has been the different approach to Privacy, GA has long been not compatible with German law and data is not in your own hands. Second most important is the Presentation of Data. With Piwik I see in one second where I need many clicks with Analytics.

Most services do not give us the fine control over our own data. They have access to information they are choosing not to share with us, notably IP addresses. Even if it's anonymized (last digits dropped), we should have the access to this data!

I've used both Piwik and Google Analytic. I still prefer Piwik for it's more user friendly interface compared to Google Analytic. For most users, Piwik would be sufficient to provide the statistics required for planning. Google Analytics has more functions that complicates matter and makes things more confusing. Most users would find a cheap, easy to implement option and more importantly, easier to manage option to be a better solution.

I have used NewRelic in the past. Currently using Adobe Analytics.
Overall, Piwik provides big volume of advanced data (just like its bigger competitors). Being easy to setup and maintain, as well as being free, is a huge plus. I liked the idea that I could access analytics data in my local server's database (I have not seen that feature anywhere else).

Google Analytics

When we were initially evaluating the replacement for our AWStats setup the first alternative we looked at was Google Analytics. The main reason we started with the Google product was because, well, it's Google, plus I had used the Google Webmaster Tools kit at several other positions and thought that it might prove to be a good fit. The statistics worked out well, and the use of reporting and keywords for campaigns was great. The problem that we ran into that made us choose otherwise was the ease of integration into our current hosting platform infrastructure. Piwik allowed us to create the backend infrastructure and code the provisioning of the site to the dashboard into our own custom provisioning API without having to jump through the Google authentication hoops. Also, there are a large number of libraries available to allow us to use Piwik for generation of statistics for our own internal provisioning tools and to track our sales numbers based on specific API calls.

The customizable dashboard is useful so we can create different environments for employees. We have some data stewards who need to see all the data, but others only need to see certain widgets.

At the time we did try Google Analytics and Urchin, however, due to our need for the upmost privacy using a product hosted on Google was difficult to sell. If you are looking for something that you can maintain separately without giving your data to Google with most of the same functionality this product is perfect.

Open Source, easier implementation.