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A more privacy friendly alternative
July 20, 2022

A more privacy friendly alternative

Wilco Wietsma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Core Plan

Modules Used

  • Analytics
  • Tag Manager
  • Consent Manager

Overall Satisfaction with Piwik PRO

Since Google Universal is slowly being phased out and with privacy becoming more and more important we decided to look for alternatives. For this moment besides GA4. We've tried several alternatives but most didn't have all the features we needed, were too expensive, or in our mind didn't have the right data safety model. With Piwik Pro, we are now testing on our corporate site and using Piwik as the only program on our Vacancy site. The great thing about Piwik is that the look in feel is quite a lot like Google Universal Analytics and such is easy to understand and comprehend for many of our users. Most of the features exist and with two weekly releases, Piwik is getting better and better. Since we are looking into and testing whether we can ditch Google altogether Piwik is especially on our shortlist because of the integrated tag manager and consent manager. The tag manager works pretty great but sometimes I experience some caveats, especially when debugging. Most of the time it ironically has to do with my own browser's privacy settings.
  • Easy to understand and read data.
  • Great authorisation management and switching between sites.
  • Your own and easy to remember login.
  • Community forum with developers and users.
  • Simple and quick settings.
  • Filtering: ip ranges, hostnames, regex. These are a few things that aren't possible like we are used to.
  • Tag Manager: not all tags/triggers are possible yet to what we are used to.
  • Are more progressive payment model: more little steps to buy a plan.
  • Custom dimensions: they weren't available but are now. But they aren't that user friendly yet as I'm used to.
  • Tag management
  • Consent management
  • Easy to use analytics
  • Authorisation management
  • Much better consent management insights.
  • Easy to read built in dashboards and reports for our HR department.
  • Much better privacy especially important when collecting data on a job site.
I can sum it up quite easy:
- GA isn't that privacy friendly, something we do require on our jobboard.
- Matomo is a great program with some unique features compared to Piwik, but the lay-out is - in my eyes - more cluttered. Also the different type of database makes it a bit slower

Besides these two I've also checked Plausible Analytics, which is a nice package but a bit to much bare bone for us right now. Especially on the part of custom dimensions.

Do you think Piwik PRO delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Piwik PRO's feature set?

Yes

Did Piwik PRO live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Piwik PRO go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Piwik PRO again?

Yes

Piwik Pro Core is especially perfect for smaller businesses that want to have an alternative to Google's ecosystem. You can do a lot of the great stuff you can do with GA UA and GA4. But it still needs some tweaking. Especially for some bigger companies who have a lot of events, it would be great to have some smaller payment steps, as of right now it can be quite steep for some companies to pay the bill if you go above 500.000 events per month. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of the better options available when data ownership and privacy come to mind.