Review: Piwik

Piwik

Piwik is an Open Source web analytics project aiming to be an alternative to Google Analytics and provides some of the best information about who and what is happening on your website that we've seen. The recently added Live! Add in can tell you about visitors connecting to your website in real time and updates itself via AJAX. An SEO Rankings add-in gives you key stats about the site & easy access to a summary of Yahoo site explorer's stats on the dashboard.
There are lots of nice graphs to give you summary's of the data its gathering which can be viewed as tables if you need and more information on your visitors that you would normally get from a stats system analysing your sites logs. It monitors users using javascript and so it can much more accurately tell when users have left your site, what they did on a page, etc..

Piwik needs to be on a server with PHP and MySQL to collect information about your visitors but doesn't have to be on the same server as your website. It's very easy to download and install, compared to other systems and, much of the time, is able to update itself.
We've been running Piwik for a few months on some servers and have seen it handle traffic up to 600 hits an hour easily, However the Live! add-in did seem to get a little stressed out and was slightly difficult to use when the Visitor Log is spewing data out so fast we found the fine tuned reaction skills from years of online gaming where put to the test!

Piwik's project homepage can be found at http://piwik.org/