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king web analytics is important part of web application development these days. Every website track there visitors activities using one or other web analytics tools. The most popular web analytics tracking tool out there is Google’s “Google Analytics”, which is free to use and provided by Google’s fast and reliable infrastructure. As the market of web analytics is growing and people (even the static/small sites owners) are taking more interests in this area, people are now looking for more open-source, and hosted solutions, which can control by them not by Google.
Piwik: As we said it’s an open source web analytics system, which is developed using php/mysql and is available free to download. You can download it free and install it to your web hosting and control it in a way you want it. Google Analytics is very good tool for website tracking facility. It allows you to track your website traffic, free for up to 5 million pageviews a month, and you get a detailed report for almost every single detail of your audience, such as search terms, entry and exits areas of your vistor, browser, operating systems details etc. Piwik is another website analytics software that is as powerful as Google Analytics and serve as a great alternative. What makes it stand out from the rest is its price (it is free to use) and the real time analytics report. Unlike most analytics tracking tools/softwares that runs on their own server, Piwik is an open source software that requires you to install on your own server. If you have a web hosting plan, most likely you already have a server on hand to install Piwik.
Pwik Analytics Dashboard Screen Shot
Piwik is available in more than 40 languages, so you will definitely find your pick 
Cool and some unique features what makes Piwik special in the market:
- Real time web analytics reports: in Piwik, reports are by default generated in real time. For high traffic websites, you can choose the frequency for reports to be processed.
- You own your web analytics data: because Piwik is installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics
using the powerful Piwik Analytics API.
- Modern, easy to use User Interface: you can fully customize your dashboard, drag and drop widgets you want to display.
- Piwik features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. You can build your own web analytics plugins or hire a consultant to have your custom feature built in Piwik.
- Vibrant international Open community of more than 100,000 active users (tracking even more websites!).
