I’ve been hearing some chatter lately about finding alternatives to Google‘s products whether it be ad services or search. And when it comes down to it, Google Analytics is still pretty hard to beat, and no, no one paid me to say that. I’ve been using Google Analytics for years, and to be honest, the number of available metrics (too many to mention) is pretty attractive, along with the price (free).

Still, when I initially started to build this site, I considered some alternatives to GAnalytics and decided to give Clicky a whirl.

Setting up Clicky is painless: Register here and set up the tracking code just like you would with Google Analytics. There is also a cool Clicky WordPress plugin available so you can get your Clicky Analytics stats right in your WordPress Dashboard. Convenient, right? In fact, there are a ton of third party apps available for use with their service.

Clicky vs Google Analytics

For an easy comparison between Clicky and Google, check out this Clicky/Google comparison chart.

After using Clicky for about 3 weeks from the initial set up of this site, I found that it was adequate for following some basic metrics. However, most of Clicky‘s best features are not freely available and I can’t really justify jumping in at $9.99 a month for Clicky before the site has generated any revenue. As well, the free account only allows you to try out their analytics on just 1 site. I guess you can create separate accounts for all of your websites, but that’s a bit of a hassle.

Staying with Google For Now

So for now we’re going to keep it simple and stay with Google Analytics. Once again, it is hard to separate accounts when Google makes it very easy to have all of your accounts in one place. However, we find that they’re still delivering the best Analytics product, at no cost to the average user.