Earlier today in the WordPress IRC help channel, someone asked the question about what’s the “best” web traffic and analytics plugin that anyone knew about. I was answering with Google Analytics as that’s what I used and had low issue with. However, someone else mentioned Piwik, and being the curious type, I checked it out.

It all looked standard fare and what I’d expect out of web analytics. However, I stumbled across this bullet point and that more or less sold me on trying it out.

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.

I really liked the idea of owning my own traffic data instead of having it all reside on Google’s server. Over time, I’ve grown to become more suspicious of what they are and could be doing with the data they have on me. While I know I can’t avoid them completely, gmail for example and android smartphones, I can limit what they have on me in other areas. I no longer use them as my default search either, I’ve moved over to Duck Duck Go.

Nonetheless, we’ll see exactly how well I end up liking Piwik, but from what I’ve seen so far, I will likely remain happy for a long while, and retain my own data.