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I created multiple sites during the last few weeks, and wondered what’s the best website statistics solution to use with them.

My requirements are:

• API/XML Export (I’m collecting the statistics in a central application)
• Realtime (almost)
• all the metrics I usually need (popular pages, referrer sites, entry pages, etc)

As mentioned here before, I used Clicky for a while, and I have to say it’s one of the best systems I know. Unfortunately the free edition is quite limited (regarding my needs): No API, Limited Sites and Tracking. However, I still use it on this and another site.

I then came across GoingUP which is quite nice too and has a free API. But again it was limited to a maximum number of visitors/sites. So I had to move on ..

I’m now using Piwik which is by far the best website statistics system I know.

It aims to be an open source version of Google Analytics:

Piwik is PHP and MySQL based, but that shouldn’t be a problem if you have a usual webserver somewhere.

You can then track multiple (remote) sites by including a short snippet. Piwik also has a very nice API featuring different output formats like XML, JSon, HTML etc and even a very nice Plugin System (if you like to develop in PHP) :)

Give it a try, it has a nice installation Routine and is up in a minute.