

Ask HN : Please Suggest a Real Time Web Analytics Tool - theone

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.<p>Please share your experience with real time analytics.
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patio11
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?

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Mystalic
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.

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sachinag
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.)

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roachsocal
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.

Sign up here: <http://getclicky.com/27959>

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paraschopra
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

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trefn
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.

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ivankirigin
<http://chartbeat.com> is super duper awesome

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

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

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timr
It applies to us. Maybe it's a bigger problem than you think.

(Edit: I just looked at clicky. It's great, and looks like it has a lot of
features that we'd use, but your most expensive plan isn't even close to the
capacity we would need.)

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schammy
I dont think it's a big problem :) Justin.tv is certainly amongst the top 1%
of sites in the world, in terms of traffic. If you have a site that has more
than 5,000 simultaneous users, you are a very very large site. There are very
few sites that can claim that kind of traffic.

There aren't many products meant for tracking a site like that, and the ones
that do cost thousands per month. You are paying just $10 for chartbeat. They
are probably losing a lot of money on your account just on the bandwidth
consumed.

I mean in the nicest possible way, but we don't have any desire to track sites
that big. The largest we allow is 500,000 daily page views, and sites that big
are paying us at leat $100 per month.

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richesh
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...](http://alpha.crowdmind.com/decision/62_What_Is_The_Best_Realtime_Web_Analytics_Tool_Or_Service)

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dhimes
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.

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richesh
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.

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

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

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richesh
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!

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

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zacharypinter
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.

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catone
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.

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davidw
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.

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apgwoz
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.

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

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theone
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?

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dimarco
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.

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schammy
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.

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richesh
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

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schammy
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!

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richesh
What if you put the scripts on Amazon EC2 (S3 or CloudFront), this will
alleviate your server load and put it on Amazon's backbone.

My startup uses Amazon EC2 for hosting etc, and so far I've been very happy.
We are not big either, actually we are a two-man team and definitely smaller
than even you guys :) But Amazon seems affordable.

Just a thought, but no worries I think the service is still tremendous. Keep
up the great job!

