Better than piwik

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I searched for something which could replace piwik. Cause it is not stable ( OsDate crashed with it )
I searched around and found on a blog a comment about open web analytics. A long time ago,
I saw this php website analytics tool. But I was not interested in something like this. And forogt about
this one.

Then I “re-found” it, and tested it. And I must say: Iam impressed. This tool works nearly out of the box.
You just have to make changes in the config file, related to your web-address and database settings. Add your site
Add your tracking code ( A javascript “similar” to google analytics ). And you are done, nice!

And the api looks much more “thought-out” than the one from piwik.

Here are the features from there website:

Invocation

  • PHP API – invoke OWA from within your PHPPHPPHP application. This allows for an easy way to build web analytics right into your application logic.
  • Javascript Tag – invoke OWA from Javascript. This allows for remote logging and integration with non PHP based applications .
  • WordPressWordPressWordPress v2.x plugin – full featured WordPress plugin seemlessly integrates OWA with the WordPress publishing platform and administration interface
  • MediaWikiMediaWikiMediaWiki plugin – provides tracking of MediaWiki articles and special pages.

Tracking/Reporting

  • Track Page views, visits, and unique visitors over time
  • TrackTRACK reviewsTRACK reviews unique, new, repeat visitors over time
  • Multiple Web Site Support – track any number of web sites and view statistics in aggregate or by site
  • ClickClick reviewsClick reviews-streams – view the actual click-stream of each visitor
  • Click Tracking – Track where exactly on a web page users are clicking and view clicks by browser type
  • Click Heat Maps – view a heat map of where users are clicking on your web pages
  • Google MapsGoogle MapsGoogle Maps – map your visitors on Google Maps
  • Google EarthGoogle EarthGoogle Earth (KML) – view your visitors in Google Earth via a KML file export
  • RSS/ATOM subscription tracking – track unique feed readers, reader types, and feed requests
  • Visitor Aging – understand the age of your repeat visitors.
  • Canned and Custom Time Periods – generate reports using pre-defined reporting periods or custom date ranges
  • Refering Page Analysis – View the title, anchor text, and surrounding text of inbound links from refering web pages
  • View visits by user agent
  • Track entry and exit pages
  • Track pages by custom page types

Development

  • Full MVC based framework
  • Module framework allows developers to extend OWA’s entitiies, events, reports, and graphs without modifying the base components.
  • Plugin framework for authentication, database access objects, data validation, and geo-location
  • Object Relational Mapping layer
  • Lite templating layer
  • Event handlers

Deployment

  • Events can be writen to the database asynchronously.
  • OWA to can run on multiple front end web servers and write to a remote database.
  • Event Logging and admin/reporting user interface can run on the same or seperate servers

WordPress Specific Features

  • Track visitors by WordPress user name or e-mail address they use in comments.
  • Track all Wordpress Page Types (Posts, PagesPages reviewsPages reviews, Authors, Archives, Categories, etc.)
  • Track the number of comments made by visit
  • Reporting accessable via Admin Dashboard
  • Track subscribers to RSS/Atom feeds

MediaWiki Specific Features

  • Track article , catageory and special pages.
  • Track all visitors by user name and email address.

Quite impressive, eh? :)

now I run crawltrack for, uhm, well crawler things. And OWA for website statistics.

The only problem so far is the “click-map/ heat map” It shows the click points. But not the website.
I hope they will fix this “small” issue :)

I dont know, why this both programs are not more popular? Together,
they create a VERY strong team!

LINKSLinks reviewsLinks reviews:
http://www.crawltrack.net/

http://www.openwebanalytics.com/

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  • Mike
    How do you track conversions (monetary and non-monetary) in OWA? And does it work with https secured pages?

    Thanks!
  • robocoder
    I doubt Piwik "crashed" OsDate.

    OsDate uses Smarty as its templating system. To insert the Piwik tracking code (or even the Google Analytics tracking code) into OsDate templates, you have to wrap the JavaScript inside Smarty's {literal} ... {/literal} tags.

    That said, I like both Piwik and OWA -- either would be a good choice.

    As for CrawlTrack ... why don't you create an OWA plugin for that?
  • andrewsuth
    I just spent the last few hours trying both Open Web Analytics 1.2.1rc1 then Piwik 0.5.4.

    First impressions:
    Open Web Analytics was very fiddly to install. I had to go into some of the PHP code and correct the mistakes as it was unusable out-of-the-box (simple PHP mistakes!). As far as the features go, they sound really good on paper but you'll soon be stopped by the clunky and not so pretty UI of OWA which seemed to frequently spit out errors. Documentation? Forget about it, it's like trying to find a needle in a hay stack.
    On a positive not, I did really like the video play back option but it still needs a lot of work.

    Piwik on the other hand was quick and easy to install, I had it up and running in 5 mins. The GUI is smooth and works like a charm - not a single error or additional download needed for it. As far as doc go, they were easy to find and had a lot of useful information and help - not that you'll need it as it's all very straight forward to get up and running.

    I'll be keeping with Piwik, thank you very much.
  • I'm sorry to hear you had issues with your OWA install. Can you share any errors that you encountered with me so we can get them fixed and incorporated into the final release? I can be reached at peter[at]openwebanalytics.com and would greatly appreciate it. thanks again.
  • OWA 1.2.1rc1 is out if you want to give it a whirl. Includes a number of fixes and a number of new features including a revamped heatmap module. If anyone finds a bug in OWA please just report it on http://trac.openwebanalytics.com and we'll get it fixed and help you troubleshoot the install.
  • i want to learn which one is really better ?
  • Q-efx
    Strange, I had similar problems with piwik. ( Thats why I searched for something better :) )

    But, I as I wrote: You should test before use.

    And at this moment I use owa on a vserver with php5, no problems so far... Maybe it uses a module which is missing?
  • Thanks for your suggestion to look at OWA, but I'm not impressed.

    I'm running Piwik for some time and it's a lot more polished, usable and mature.

    Open Web Analytics was very difficult to install (error installing the database scheme, where I had to dig deep into the code to fix this - appears to work with PHP4 only).
    After having installed it (which included more fixes), and setting up a workaround to make the AJAX requests work between subdomains / crossdomain, the backend is a joke.. there are apparently other problems left, since domain names show up empty, first visit is from 3606 days ago etc.
    I've been interested in reports about Exit Pages and the clickheat map, but neither works for me (in the Click Map Report I get the OWA login).

    Maybe something stupid as having missed a required "http://" when setting up the domain _name_ happened..?!

    I'll send the fixes I've done so far to the team/author, but will stay with Piwik.
  • Q-efx
    Well, first:

    As I wrote: OsDate crashed with piwik.

    Second: There are good plugins, one for wordpress, and one for mediawiki and one for media gallery. So should be able to create your own plugins.

    third: It is faster on used websites. Cause you could include it with a php ( If on same server, and it seems to be more responsive on used sites )

    Fourth: It is very easy to include your own data in statistics. With something like this:

    $app_params['page_title'] = $title; //The title of the web page

    So, whatever you like to track, could be easy added

    Read more here:

    http://wiki.openwebanalytics.com/index.php?titl...

    The wiki is not full of data. I know. But this is cause it lacks "popularity". But you could use and create the documentation from the source files. They are not the best. But it should be enough.

    And in owa, you have a "small" acl system. Which could be useful.

    And the gui, is much cleaner, and more accessible than the piwik one.

    Well, but at least. If you want to test things. And have to decide between piwik or owa. You should test it on your own.

    I prefer owa, over piwik. But that is just my point of view. If you like owa ( after testing ) you should spread the word about it. :)
  • Arie
    I wonder why do you specify that piwik is not stable. I am currently evaluating os web analytics tools and hit your post. From a first look it seems that Open Web Analytics is less mature and less developed. Documentation lacks, no live examples - what makes you think that OWA is better than piwik? Looking for information that will help my evaluation
  • Hi there,
    Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
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