Piwik Analytics is a web analytics platform that would be equally at home in a busy marketing agency or in the hands of an enthusiastic blogger.

Piwik is available as a downloadable, free, version to run on your own webserver or as a cloud based, not free of charge, option. I suspect that most people will go for the latter, who wants to be bothered with running their own webserver these days?

So, given that the entry level price, when you eventually find it – they don’t make it easy – is 29 Euros per month, what does Piwik give you that good old free of charge Google Analytics doesn’t. I’m still looking but haven’t found anything yet, except the fact that the data is your own data and not messed around with by Google, leaving big gaps.

Looking around their website I found that the “history” page has not been updated since 2013 and that the articles I looked at all seem a few years old as well leaving me wondering whether Piwik is a product that has been put on a backburner by its owners. They do claim to have had almost 3 million downloads at the time of writing although how many of those were generated automatically is not disclosed – what would be more helpful is to know how many actual, live instances there are but I suspect we won’t be getting that data anytime soon.

Nonetheless, you may wish to give it a try – there’s a 30 day free trial available so you’ve nothing to lose and they do seem to have some nice reporting options – although Google is improving its own dashboard feature as well.

Piwik also offer a mobile app so that you can access your data on the go – always a welcome addition to any service. There also seems to be a thriving Piwik marketplace for third party apps, many of which appear to be available for free.

We will schedule a full Piwik review in the near future using their WordPress plugin option but until then, don’t turn off your Google Analytics just yet!