Free analytics that you own
December 21, 2018
Free analytics that you own
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Matomo (formerly Piwik)
We use Matomo in the software department as a monitoring tool for one of our web application, mainly to benchmark the system's behavior. We are refactoring the current implementation with the goal to improve the performance, the scalability, and the uptime. One way to know if we are on the right track is to benchmark it and see the actual progress with each change or added new technology.
- Nice way of seeing the data: visitors and traffic. Also, the user interface is somewhat customizable.
- Support for multiple sites, displayed in useful dashboards.
- Access to the raw data since you have the database local.
- Open source - especially useful when you have no budget for software purchasing.
- I find the real-time map feature very useful when we load the system n times more to stretch its limits.
- Installation can be a small pain, especially if install permissions are controlled by IT on development environments also.
- When large sets of data need to be displayed, it can be a little slow. It looks like the database design and the queries used have room for optimization.
- Since it needs to be "present" in all the pages of the web application, if something goes wrong with Matomo, it can break your app. They call it the JavaScript Tracking Tag that needs to be there on all pages.
- 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.
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.