Clicky vs. Woopra vs. Chartbeat

29 Aug

Real-time analytics is cool. Google Analytics just doesn’t cut it for ADD freaks who can’t stand waiting hours to see who was on their website. I have a hard time finding practical uses for real-time web analytics, but that doesn’t kill my primal ego-driven desire to know:

who is on my website
where they are from
what page they are looking at
whether they’ve taken an action such as adding an item to their shopping cart

I’ve tried Clicky, Woopra, Chartbeat, and even Spring Metrics. (Spring Metrics is a sort of a hybrid Chartbeat for ecommerce sites, but I didn’t use it much so this overview will be limited to the first three. It looks like Chartbeat is coming out with their own ecommerce-focused product: Shopbeat.)

Looks
Chartbeat is the most beautiful of the bunch. If you’re into aesthetics, Chartbeat is for you. In contrast, Clicky looks like it was designed by a high school programmer. Woopra is primarily accessed through a desktop client, which is pretty enough.

Functionality
In terms of base functionality (the bullet points above) Clicky’s got the lead. With Chartbeat a visitor disappears from the dashboard the moment they leave your site. While you’d think this is desired — it is “real-time” and all — it is rather annoying to take a look a just miss someone with no reference for what just happened.

There’s also another major difference between Clicky & Chartbeat… Clicky seems to focus on visitors with a drilldown into what pages the visitor is viewing. Chartbeat on the other hand concentrates on pages. This provides a nice interface, but there’s a big disconnect as you can’t follow individual visitors. You can see there are 5 people on page Z, but you can’t see that visitor 1 went from page A -> K -> Z.

Woopra is a mix between the two in how it reports pages and visitors with various views and reports — but it also suffers from Chartbeat’s issue most visibility is lost the second a visitor leaves your site.

Both Clicky & Woopra also have an incredibly useful feature: flagging certain page views as “goals” and then showing you immediately when a visitor reaches this milestone. I have both set up to notify me when a user takes an action. If I don’t happen to be viewing the respective interface exactly when this occurs, I can have Clicky send me an email. Woopra dings my computer.

Price
I have a low volume site, so you’ll have to do your own research on pricing in the higher echelons. Chartbeat is the most expensive of the bunch — they’ve gotta pay those fantastic interface designers. The free version of Woopra has all the functionality I need. Clicky has a free version, but you have to pay $10/mo for crucial features such as tracking goals.

Killer Feature
Woopra also ties in a rather useful feature: live chat. This helps justify all the time-suck, ADD-driven, I-just-have-to-know-who’s-on-my-site-now craziness over real-time analyics. When someone reaches a goal (or whenever), you can initiate a nice-looking chat with the user that they can accept or reject.

Given that Woopra is free and has this killer feature, I’ve canceled my paid Clicky account and plan to use Woopra for all my real-time “needs”. When I can afford it, I’ll probably get a Chartbeat account as well because it looks so cool. I recommend you give them all for a spin to see what makes you happy.

By the way, I’m running Woopra on this site, so I’m watching you! (Or I’m actually working.)