There are a number of open source web stats programs out there. Many have been around for quite some time. The big 3 are Analog, Webalizer, and AWStats. I used to be a fan of the Analog + Report Magic combination. However Analog is now quite out of date. Webalyzer was recently updated after 4 years of stagnation. I tried out AWStats which has stayed current but found its setup to be cumbersome. In looking for alternatives I came across a number of newer, and often smaller, projects. The one I tried tonight was Visitors and I am extremely satisfied with it thus far. It was trivial to setup and the results were helpful. It focuses on per IP (Visitor) stats while ignoring some other stats which would be nice like overall page hits and traffic graphs. I’m hoping that it plus Piwik might be a good solution for most websites, though I recognize that AWStats, though unfun to configure, might still be necessary to meet some needs.

I recently completed an evaluation of rails plugins for gathering statistics. I tried railstat, sitealyzer, and hit_tracker. To save the suspense I would recommend against using any of them. I had 2 separate scenarios: simple hit tracking for pages and web statistics for a site. These 3 plugins are what I came across in my searches. Here are my experiences with each.