Piwik is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytics software program. It provides you with detailed reports on your website visitors: the search engines and keywords they used, the language they speak, your popular pages… and so much more. Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics. Piwik is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver. At the end of the five minute installation process you will be given a JavaScript tag. Simply copy and paste this tag on websites you wish to track (or use an existing plugin to do it automatically for you) and access your analytics reports in real time. 
In laymens terms, you can check out who has been visiting your page, when, how and why. If you don't speak english, fear not. Piwik is available in more than 30 languages (and growing).
What makes Piwik unique from the competition: - Real time web analytics reports: in Piwik, by default reports are generated in real time. For high traffic websites, you can choose the frequency for reports to be processed (more info)
- Piwik's features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own web analytics plugins!
- you own your data: because Piwik is installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)
- the user interface is fully customizable: you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display and create a report especially tailored to you!
Give it a try - you can try the online demo that shows you the latest Piwik release. Please note that Piwik is a constant work in progress and some user interface parts are being updated as we speak!
- to install Piwik, download the latest release, upload it on your webserver (you need at least PHP 5.1 and a Mysql database), and open your browser: the installation process is automatic and takes less than 5 minutes.
Want to know more? Piwik is under development and our hard working core team is growing. We take great pride in Piwik as it stands but also love to spend many precious hours improving current features or expanding and implementing new features (it's a constant work of progress!). We have a plan for Piwik 1.0 and we are happy you want to know more! We often post news and web analytics information on the official blog (subscribe to the rss feed). If you really want to help us with Piwik and have some free time to commit to helping us, you can become part of our world-wide team and participate and join the fun. You can, for example, tell us by email if you are interested in working on translations or beta-testing. If you have suggestions or visions for new web analytics related features, feel free to post your ideas in the forums. We are very open to your ideas and contributions as we view this as a collaborative community effort. If you are a developer, you can definitely help. One of our main objectives is to make it easy for external developers to build plugins for Piwik. Head on over to the developer zone for more information about How to build plugins for Piwik. Are you thinking of helping Piwik core? There are lots of interesting problems to solve, new features to implement and bugs to fix: check out the contribute page for more information and links. The developer zone contains all the resources to get started. The roadmap will tell you where we are going to, what new features are planned, what new analytics reports are under consideration, etc. You can report a bug or work on some of the existing bug reports. For any technical questions you should ask on the piwik-hackers mailing list ; we will be happy to help.
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