Giant Robot

I've just installed Piwik on three sites that get a decent amount of traffic (and are expecting a fair kick in the pants over the next six months). It looks great!

Piwik is an open-source analytics tool which compares itself to Google Analytics. Personally, I don't mind Google Analytics; my perspective is that in any trade where I exchange a relatively small amount of usage data with them, I get the sort of detail that Google Analytics offers for free, then that's a good thing for me and for the people I work for.

On a less pragmatic, more philosophical reason, I can totally understand why a tool like Google Analytics might not be acceptable to some organisations. And that's where Piwik steps up, because it can track much (all?) of the same data, offers what seems to be a higher degree of extensibility, and means that the site owner can also own the tracking and usage data.

One thing I did anticipate, based on my experience of Slimstat a year or two ago, was that a tool like this would have a noticeable impact on performance. I'll definitely keep an eye on this aspect (we track database load on these sites fairly closely) but at a first glance I'm impressed that Piwik doesn't make so much of a dent.

I'll be test-driving Piwik over the next month or two and evaluating its performance and reporting capabilities.

I wonder where the name came from?