Ask HN : Please Suggest a Real Time Web Analytics Tool

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662888

by theone • 17 years ago

41 34 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

For some time I've been using Clicky for my real time analytics. But now that free period is expired, i have to buy a pro version. Before buying I thought it would be better if I could get some opinion on other alternatives as well.

Please share your experience with real time analytics.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

http://chartbeat.com is super duper awesome

timr2• 17 years ago

...unless you hit the upper limit of 5,000 simultaneous users on your site. Then, it's only sort of awesome.

_sgo45• 17 years ago

And how many sites would that ever apply to? Like, 10 total sites?

buro9• 17 years ago

The Page Load Time numbers for your end users are really useful.

I think it's an oft-neglected metric that is a real difference for your users. You can assess in real time whether a reduced image size, or some different HTML has actually made a perceivable difference in speed to your users.

The translation of this speed into revenue is also something else.

Fuzzy made-up numbers: Above 5 seconds, people leave. Above 2 seconds, people tolerate. Get the page load below 2 seconds, people stick. Get the page load below 1 second and the site starts to become invisible to them and they become highly productive.

Mystalic• 17 years ago

Mint has not let me down: http://haveamint.com

It's a self-hosted solution, and you can see how people are coming in via referrals, SERPs, etc. in real-time.

sachinag• 17 years ago

We use Mint and GA. GA for goals and long-term trend planning and all that stuff; Mint purely to see the source of traffic spikes and search keywords that are driving traffic. I've been told that there's good stuff in Peppermill, but haven't been bothered to investigate. (Avinish is pretty insistent that you don't try to track the same stuff with different programs, otherwise you'll go mad trying to reconcile.)

Jem• 17 years ago

Echoing that. I have 6 Mint licenses, and have recommended it to several clients. It's good stuff.

borga• 17 years ago

I second that too. It's a nice application and cheap.

udfalkso• 17 years ago

http://reinvigorate.net has been great for me. I am curious what else is out there though, thanks for bringing up the topic.

theone2• 17 years ago

But Reinvigorate is in Beta mode and one needs a key for registering on it. Moreover is there any daily limit on page views it can track?

imp• 17 years ago

Been using Clicky Pro for a year now and I like it. I use both it and Google Analytics.

slig• 17 years ago

+1 I'm still on the 30-dray trial and I'm considering paying for it.

patio11• 17 years ago

I mean this in the nicest possible way: if your time to learn a new analytics tool is cheaper than the $100 or so it costs for Clicky for a year, I would reevaluate whether you need real time analytics. Are you sure staying glued to a constant stream of updates is a productive use of your time at this stage in your startup's life?

paraschopra• 17 years ago

You can signup for a free beta for the product I have been developing: http://www.wingify.com/

In addition to real time analytics, it provides built-in behavioral targeting and multivariate testing (website optimization) capabilities.

Mail me at paras@wingify.com if you are interested

froo• 17 years ago

I liked Woopra when it first came out - http://www.woopra.com/

roachsocal• 17 years ago

I would stick with Clicky. If your traffic is under 100,000 pageviews / day, I haven't found a better one.

The founders are very responsive and there's a good community built around it. I use their REST API to actually integrate popularity into my site. Works great.

trefn• 17 years ago

We're working on http://mixpanel.com right now. It's centered around tracking user behavior & interactions, which makes it a great complement to GA.

Signups are open. Feel free to email me at tim@mixpanel.com if you are interested & have questions.

dimarco• 17 years ago

We use Woopra for realtime web stats. It now handles HTTPS and has a pretty neat desktop client. We've yet to dive into it's API, but it's available.

_sgo45• 17 years ago

You basically have four real options for real time analytics, and they all either cost money, or are in beta and soon will cost money.

1. Chartbeat. $10/month. Pretty slick, honestly, especially if you only care about "right now".

2. Woopra. Free while in private beta. Getting accepted into the beta typically takes several weeks. Used to see tons of complaints about bugs and inaccurate stats. Seems to be less of an issue these days.

3. Mint. $30 per site. Self hosted / installed. Plugin system to add custom functionality.

4. Clicky. My personal favorite. Over 100,000 sites use it, so it must be at least pretty good, right?

Disclaimer: I made Clicky.

theone2• 17 years ago

Good Job Done !!!! Clicky is nice specially that SPY Feature rocks. Just have a query does the Daily Pageviews limit are very stringent.

_sgo45• 17 years ago

Thanks. If you compare us to any other analytics servic that charges money, I think you will find our prices for the amount of page views you can track are amongst the very lowest in the business. In fact, as far as I know, we are the lowest. I invite you to prove me wrong!

richesh5• 17 years ago

Great job and a great product! I do have one concern which is that the site is very slow and the scripts on our pages take considerable milliseconds to get. on an average twice as much as Google Analytics. Any reason for this? Also, if we make it so that the scripts load after the page has loaded, will this cause any issues?

I guess I should post this on support

_sgo45• 17 years ago

Unlike Google, we are a small company and don't have millions to throw at hosting data centers all around the world on insanely fast connections. So it is very understandable that our code loads a bit slower. It is certainly a high priorty that our service has as little effect as possible on third party sites, but competing with Google is tough business!

davidw• 17 years ago

antirez' thing is here: http://lloogg.com/ - looks like it's still in closed beta, but I bet he'd let people from here have a crack at it.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

I like lloogg. My biggest complaint is that if you refresh the console, you lose the aggregate statistics, which is annoying. I haven't used it in a few months though, so maybe that's been fixed.

catone• 17 years ago

I used to use http://www.w3counter.com/ and never had any problems with it. I honestly don't know how it compares to the rest mentioned here, though, as I have never used them.

richesh5• 17 years ago

I paid $60 for Clicky for 12 months ($5/month). This is the best service out there, I switched from Google Analytics to Clicky and I've been so happy and its 60 bucks well spent!

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

Are there any generic event tracking services?

I'd like to be able to log generic events (either serverside or clientside) and then aggregate and display the information in a useful format.

Most of these sites seem to be based on browser sessions.

richesh5• 17 years ago

I created this page for you, it might help to collect and rate all your options and reasons here:

http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/62_What_Is_The_Best_Real...

dhimes• 17 years ago

One comment on your page: you don't need a spare server for mint. It's just javascript, and resides on your site. It's no sweat at all to install.

richesh5• 17 years ago

The installation points out that you need Apache and MySQL server. I wouldn't want to run this on my production server, so if I was to use Mint I would prefer another server.

Ask HN : Please Suggest a Real Time Web Analytics Tool

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