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Piwik review by Mike Tihonchik
May 06, 2014

Piwik review by Mike Tihonchik

Mike Tihonchik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

1.8.4

Overall Satisfaction with Piwik

We used Piwik to monitor customer interactions across several platforms in the organization, i.e. web and mobile apps. Initially, Piwik was selected as a top level analytic tool to show us simple stats such as mobile platform and devices (iOS & Android; iPhone and iPad) used, or user's browser selection. I have also created some custom plugins to provide specific information regarding visits to certain pages by users. Other than iOS and Android platforms, Piwik was used with JavascriptMVC web platform
  • Ease of integration into the environment
  • Easy to create custom plugins using PHP
  • Piwik was setup on our own servers (straight forward process), so we had more control over data, compared to NewRelic or Omniture
  • It's Open-Source... enough said...
  • I think Piwik could use a face-lift in the dashboard GUI department. I have used both NewRelic (best presentation in my opinion) and Adobe Omniture, and both seems to have a better flowing, modern-design dashboard GUI that is somewhat easier to navigate
  • Had to make sure analytics server that is running Piwik is always "up", as we hosted our own instances
  • Being a developer, none of these were up to me.
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).
Given, that I do not make a decision wherever to buy the product, I think the biggest culprit would be name recognition (that Piwik currently lacks compared to Google Analytics and such). Also, not to put it into negative light, but being "free" raises eyebrows, as being a lesser software
I think the question whenever to pick or not to pick Piwik as an anlytics solution will largely depend on the skill-set of developers and current company's infrastructure. Obviously, Piwik has a vast amount of data available, comparing to the other big name analytic data providers, but I have worked in the company that preferred to host as little as possible on their servers, so Piwik would not be a good solution for them. Also, the price is a major factor. New Relic was super expensive, where Piwik was free (as far as I could remember)